Hacker News Reader

Comment by jollofricepeas | Hacker News Reader

Good point.

Every entrepreneur should also be forced to sell their business instead of passing that equity to their children. No more rent-seeking, multi-generational family businesses.

Matter of fact, let’s force the same on anyone with a 401k, IRA, or Roth as well because at the end of the day it’s all equity, right?

All equity stakes much be converted to cash upon death and either returned to the state OR given to charity.

That’s the way to make “Single serving wealth” happen and put an end to rent-seeking.

View on HN

Man, that would be great. Imagine how society could change when you cannot accrue an outsized wealth via inheritance, and instead everyone can have food, shelter, healthcare, and more. Maybe people would do things to help humanity rather than just their own interests.

You are being sarcastic, but in reality, yes, many family businesses are absolutely multi-generational rent-seeking schemes that solely exist to extract capital from people.

That said, your comparison to forced confiscation of retirement plans by the state or charity is very strange, because it's not as if on your brother's death the state would come in and takes every cent he's ever made as a producer of IP.

In fact, the state literally does the opposite, and gives your brother's children and grandchildren the entire backing of both the civil and criminal justice systems. This is why we spent the 90's and 2000's sitting through VHS tapes telling us that unauthorized copying will be met with an FBI investigation, $250k in fines, and 5 years in prison.

It's not quite the same. When the children inherit a business, they usually have to do real work to keep it. Incompetence eventually destroys it. When the children do it right, a business keeps on existing and creating some sort of benefit to society -- it keeps on doing whatever it does, employs people, etc.

Meanwhile there's no effort involved in collecting royalties from your father's work, and no social benefits are provided by it.

If all of the inherited wealth upon death was put into the education system, and only education, then yes I would back this 100%. It would be a way to maintain level playing fields, and allow entrepreneurs to congratulate themselves for creating a better society.

Maybe not all, a progressive tax should apply : consider small multigenerational family-only/mostly businesses ! (Note that when none of the children are available they already often have trouble finding buyers they can trust.)

If you take out the sarcastic "all" implied in your tweet it's not really that far off from what has been suggested many times over with regards to a wealth tax, no?

This seems sort of like whataboutism.

There's nothing stopping an extremely successful and wealthy artist from handing down the money he made to his children. If they want to use that money to continue doing artwork in his style, using everything they have learned from him, there's nothing stopping them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com