Anyone who believes we should live in a meritocracy (or thinks we already do) should support a 100% estate tax.
To be a little less snarky, this kind of simple prescription gets very, very complicated in practice. You really want to make it so that a lower-middle-class family whose primary breadwinner dies has to lose 100% of their assets? No? Okay, now we have exceptions to the 100% estate tax. What about spouses who outlive their partner? If I die, should my wife get kicked out of the house that we own jointly? If not, what happens when Joe Billionaire marries someone who he never gives any indication of regarding as a spouse right after his terminal cancer diagnosis, and she marries his son right after Joe's death? What if she marries Joe, immediately divorces him, his divorce settlement gives her the overwhelming majority of his assets, and the she marries his son and they immediately divorce and the settlement gives him the overwhelming majority of their assets?
What if Joe Billionaire starts foundations and those foundations employ his children? What if he starts a for-profit company that he owns 100% of the stock of, the company employs all his children and pays them $100M a year until the company runs out of money? At the end of his life, the government can take all the stock of the now-worthless company.
What if Joe Billionaire locates his assets in a different jurisdiction?
People (mostly) don't go to these extremes right now because they don't stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars if they don't.
I'm talking about the estate tax we already have, where that family is already exempt:
>Because of these exemptions, it is estimated that only the largest 0.2% of estates in the U.S. will pay the tax.[7] For 2017, the exemption increased to $5.5 million. In 2018, the exemption doubled to $11.18 million per taxpayer due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
The rest of your examples aren't especially meaningful, the existence of loopholes doesn't mean we can't start with something simple and adjust it later. Those methods already exist and are used to dodge existing taxes, that doesn't mean taxes are a flawed concept.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-income-t...
>Sure, there are anecdotes galore. Everyone seems to know someone who has fled California to dodge its high taxes. But there’s no wholesale bolting of the rich.
>“Substantially more rich people are moving into California than moving out,” says Cristobal Young
https://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-millionaires-leaving...
>Florida, which ranked 39th in per capita income in 2017 according to the U.S. Census Bureau, gained the most income through migration. But Florida generally is considered an outlier, given its extremely attractive climate.
>“When Florida is excluded, there is virtually no tax migration,” the report states.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2015/02/02/frances-7...
If I'm wrong, why?
All this aside, I think it's great that this gentleman made this choice. I think it will do a lot more good this way, and might even make his son more successful (by avoiding trust-fund syndrome).
While that process may be necessary to incentivize innovation, it has societal costs, and it's not unreasonable to consider offsetting those costs by confronting the wealth gap directly.
But I would argue the concentration of extreme wealth in few hands actually hinders innovation, and therefore makes society poorer overall, because a great number of people who might otherwise contribute creatively to major societal problems instead must focus their efforts on daily survival.
This is my issue with the whole "wealth inequality" concept. It's just that: you have more money than I do. So what? Sure, I'd like more money, but I don't think it's the government's job to take your money and give it to me. I have never seen the issue with CEOs making tens of millions of dollars; they do a very singular job (in a well-run company).
> Technology picks up some of the slack by raising the floor standard of living, but only if doing so is also profitable for the financier or seller of the technology, and never anything beyond that.
You think the Gates Foundation operates on a for-profit basis? I think you are correct with respect to businesses, but would prefer non-profits pick up the slack for the very bottom of society, rather than the government.
> While that process may be necessary to incentivize innovation, it has societal costs, and it's not unreasonable to consider offsetting those costs by confronting the wealth gap directly.
I agree it has societal costs. How do you propose to directly address it? I don't think giving the government the power to take and distribute how it deems best is a good solution.
> the concentration of extreme wealth in few hands actually hinders innovation, and therefore makes society poorer overall, because a great number of people who might otherwise contribute creatively to major societal problems instead must focus their efforts on daily survival.
Though it does have problems, I think it also makes it easier in some ways. Angel investors can make it much easier to start a business, and certainly easier than if you had to pitch the middle class for two thousand dollars a piece.
I guess my overall issue is that I don't know of a better way. The best solution I can come up with to help is to stop the crony capitalist element, subsidies, etc.; where government picks winners and hands out contracts. I don't trust the government (particularly not the federal) to do most anything right, and I think if they are given more money (via, say, increased taxes), they will just waste it, likely signing more large, crony-ist government contracts in the process.
If there's a better solution, what might it be? I think if one is proposed, maybe it's best to test it on a state or local level first. I tend to start from a moral perspective: how can we morally justify taking money from others at gunpoint to make things "fairer"?
How do we justify it for paying for our common defense (the military), theoretically blind justice (the court system), public roads and infrastructure, critical public health programs? The answer is that if we don't, there would be dire consequences. It's not so different for the consequences of high inequality, or as someone recently put it cheekily: the Hamptons are not defensible ground.
However, you appear to be conflating taxation as a method of raising government revenue with the question of whether a society should have have resource redistribution of any kind.
Can you propose an alternate mechanism for raising government revenue, other than by threat of seizing it?
Or perhaps you simply oppose governments raising revenue at all, and by consequence, the existence of government itself?
We have many contemporary examples of societies that lack the ability to centrally tax and raise revenue. What happens in these places is revenue still gets raised, but in a decentralized way, and usually with the threat of real violence.
Perhaps it depends how they got it. If they got it by "unfairly" taking it from their neighbour at gunpoint, can we morally justify taking it from them at gunpoint - perhaps in order to return it to that neighbour? If that seems like a fair action, if we can justify that, then the principle is established that sometimes it is morally justified, and we then need "only" identify those qualifying situations.
We call those people robbers and do just that. Any one who takes money at gunpoint is such. I'm not sure if you were trying to make a different point, but we're pretty good at arresting violent criminals and punishing them.
I suggest, and you appear to agree, that sometimes it IS morally justifed to do so. The principle established, with both of us agreeing that sometimes it is morally justified to forcefully redistribute wealth, now it only falls to us to decide when we should do this forceful redistribution of wealth.
In the interests of not coming across as a passive-aggressive dickhead, I believe that the US and the UK (where I happen to live) are, to a large extent, meritocracies, and I think this is a bad thing that stunts (many) people's opportunities to excel and achieve. I suspect we have quite different working definitions of "meritocracy".