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Comment by nnfy | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I look forward to being barred from sharing the wealth that I've accumulated with my children and other loved ones. Why should they have any advantage, right? After all, you probably think I didnt do anything myself, right?

Who are you to make that decision for someone?

And, frankly, you're delusional if you think an estate tax is non distortive. The entire meaning of wealth would change for the elderly.

One cannot treat wealth like a zero sum game. More importantly, we need to rid ourselves of this growing crabs in a bucket mentality, because we all suffer when we hold society's best back. Is it "fair" in the sense of absolute wealth? No, but people shouldn't be so focused on their neighbor's plate then theirs is full enough that they can spend hours complaining online about how much more money the 1% have. Perhaps we should redefine fair wealth distribution to rightfully consider merit, which is shockingly absent from the majority view here.

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This thought experiment isn't about looking at your neighbors plate, it's about incentives for us as a society. I think the question to answer for yourself is whether you think everyone should start with a fair playing field or not and the implications such a tax would have on how you structure society to ensure that everyone gets the same shots at a good life.

There is substantially more value for all of us in allowing more resources to be distributed to those who are able to do more with them.

And your definition of "fair playing field" is skewed because, again, you treat economics as a zero sum game. You are making the classic mistake of conflating equality of outcome with equality of opportunity.

In any case, this class warfare inspired policy of exhaustively taxing wealth won't fix a mismanaged budget or a broken scholarly culture. You are simply punishing the people who seem to have benefited most in the context of the system while ignoring merit.

Further, it is absolutely absurd to suggest that modern people in poverty dont live "good" lives. They have refrigeration, air conditioning, entertainment, access to the internet, emergency healthcare, they live like kings once did. Once again this is a problem of looking at other peoples' lives and concluding that only in comparison you deserve more for simply existing.

Taxation will not fix what is fundamentally a cultural problem.

Aside: Look at how absurd the entire argument is! We dont question in absolute terms how our poor are living, we focus entirely on the fact that the wealth is distributed unevenly. Like children complaining that their classmates have extra candy. The whole mindset is petty.

> There is substantially more value for all of us in allowing more resources to be distributed to those who are able to do more with them.

Don't you think that inheritance is a pretty bad way of achieving that? After all, traits like intelligence (which probably dominates the ability to use resources efficiently) are only about 50% heritable.

When intelligence is literally the trait which enables development of science and technology, who in their right mind would not spend money on children of intelligent adultst with a 50% success rate? Dont you realize someone on the high end of the IQ curve would be exponentially more beneficial to society if given resources? How much have a couple hundred visionaries shaped our daily lives?

Why dont we spend more federal funds on gifted children? We watch the trainwreck that is our school system as we fail to match pupils in other countries at senior high school level. The issue is, again, not taxation, on the contrary, we are not spending enough where it counts because of the greed of the entitled.

I think you're reading a lot into the comment you're replying to that wasn't there. Sounds more like he's coming from a rawlsian perspective of what constitutes a just society.

>You are making the classic mistake of conflating equality of outcome with equality of opportunity.

Outcome and opportunity is a false dichotomy. But if we were to go along with it, isn't a tax on inherited wealth a great way to maintain equality of opportunity?

I think you are right about leaving something to our children. It's a very natural human (mammal!) instinct, but there are a lot of middle ground between don't leave anything and leave them an empire.

About merit, I think I know about merit. If you take the public transport at 5:30 in the morning you will see a lot of people that go to work for years for a ridiculous small pay and, that if they stopped doing that, society as we know would stop. That, I think, have a lot of merit.

On the other hand, in any standard corporation, you can find people with huge wages, with company car, that never pay a lunch because they put in the expenses account and that employ its time in political movements to try to go up in the ladder.

Of course, if you think that markets give everyone whatever they deserve, or you have not been in the public transport at 5:30, then, what I'm saying doesn't make any sense.

basically, your argument is that you know better than the market. Let me assure you, this isn't so. Source: grew up in the USSR.

Markets are optimization processes, so, very powerful tools.

Leaving the metric to optimize to the optimization process doesn't look a good idea, the same way it's not a good idea to leave the thermostat to choose the temperature.

In my experience, the only people that think that the thermostat it's who should choose the temperature, it's the people that feels very comfortable with the current one and don't care about the comfort of the others in the house. Or, maybe, also the people that grew up in a house without thermostat and thinks, correctly, that anything is better.

I really like your analogy, but what did you mean by "anything is better"?

Yeah, sorry, it was not well done. I mean, anything is better than a house without a thermostat, even a house where the thermostat is the boss.

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