|
The problem with inherited wealth in general is that you end up with aristocracies. I mean, that's literally how aristocracies formed in the first place. Wealth begets wealth, so the fixed point of a society without confiscatory inheritance tax is feudalism. > Why do we even care about billionaires anyway? For one thing, money is power. It's undemocratic to allow some people to be worth millions of times others. If you allow some individuals to become infinitely wealthy, they will eventually buy your political system and bend it to benefit them. In principle, that's bad. In practice, it's happened. For another, the way the wealthy got rich constitutes a wholesale transfer of wealth from the nation. Bill Gates is a rich man because he benefited from government spending and welfare for the rich. Specifically from a form of welfare for the rich known as 'intellectual property law', which means people have to pay a large fee to Microsoft, enforced by the US government, to copy some 1's and 0's. He got rich from government spending on education, infrastructure and defense, which built a stable middle class that could buy computers. He also got rich from the defense and research spending that built the internet and gave the technology freely to the people. Finally, he got even richer from monopolistic anti-competitive behavior, and tax evasion which put Microsoft's tax address in Nevada, and from the political lobbying that allowed this theft to happen. Bill Gates, like all billionaires, is a welfare queen, and the wealth he's sitting on should be returned to the nation he took it from. |