[fennecfoxen]

> Who live off the labor of those of us who do work, the labor time of which they expropriate with their dividends and profits?

You know, you certainly don't have to like entitled rich children of millionaires, billionaires, and industrialists. I certainly don't. But this rant confuses me for a few reasons. First, if we have a system where people are allowed to own capital and that's legitimate, doesn't inheritance just follow? I mean, what's the alternative you're after here without heirs? When Steve Jobs died, should the government have taken his shares and distributed to all current Apple employees? (And if so, according to what formula - proportional to pay? time served? the product of the two? equal division?) And why stop at just the shares - what about the shares of other companies, and his houses and cars and any bars of gold he bought with salaries or shares he'd previously sold? Where's the line? How much is the line? Do we redistribute everything to company employees? What about people who own multiple companies? Or maybe being at the company is no part of it - should the government have just auctioned off his estate for the general fund? Doesn't the government already sort of do that when it collects a roughly 50% inheritance tax? Is that not enough? How much exactly is enough? I could go on... Also, all that notwithstanding, morally: isn't that one of the things human beings work for, a good life for their children and grandchildren? If you respect the original industrialist, can you respect this? (If you don't respect the original industrialist, why are we attacking his heirs?)

Second, are they really even all that big of players in the large-corporation ownership scene writ large? Even in the absence of taxes, big inheritances will spread themselves out over several generations unless all rich kids are only children.

> They need us, we don't need them.

Then quit and found your own company.

[rayiner]

Inheritance does not naturally follow from the existence of private capital. Just because the state protects wealth earned by someone does not mean it needs to commit to protecting the transfer of that wealth after death.

To the contrary, inheritance is a weird construct. Dead people don't have property rights--inheritence is a whole mechanism to get around that.

Of course if we got rid of inheritance people would just make inter vivos gifts.

[EliRivers]

"First, if we have a system where people are allowed to own capital and that's legitimate, doesn't inheritance just follow?"

No, it doesn't necessarily follow. We could have a system based on the idea that people should benefit from their own efforts. You can own capital, well done you, and you can even choose to give your property to other people - it's yours, after all - but giving involves one person losing the benefit of it. Inheritance involves people holding onto things until they don't need it any more, and have no use for it, and whatever happens to it next affects them not at all, but they still want to be able to dictate what happens to it. We could jack up inheritance tax to basically 100%, and still have a society in which people can own capital and we encourage people to benefit from their own efforts.

[JoeAltmaier]

In this day of clever contracts, I could write one where I co-own my capital until I die. Thus constructing inheritance even if it doesn't generally exist in law. Like charitable remainder trusts etc.

[EliRivers]

You could; that would be better. Such a contract would have to surrender some control to the other co-owner; in effect, you've given something away, while you were alive. Trusts do a similar thing; the Duke of Westminster just "inherited" a large chunk of London, but he can't just do whatever he wants with it (that said, it is clearly tilted way too far in his favour).

I've no doubt some people would try to cheat the system, but that requires the taxman to look the other way; we already have situations in which people have tried to cheat by obeying the law in paperwork only, and a taxman paying attention can get them.

There already are cases in which people try to come up with clever contracts to attempt to dodge inheritance tax, and the taxman has been known to tear it up.

[dpark]

> Such a contract would have to surrender some control to the other co-owner

No, it wouldn't. You could easily structure this contract such that the person on the receiving end has no control until the original owner dies.

[EliRivers]

We call that a "will". They already exist. The new owner pays inheritance tax because they've inherited things. Labelling it something else doesn't change it. People already tried.

I did say that people already tried this sort of thing and that the taxman has come down on them in the past. This has really been tried and really not worked.

[dpark]

> We call that a "will". They already exist. The new owner pays inheritance tax because they've inherited things.

You're hypothesizing a world where inheritance isn't a recognized thing and asserting that in such a world, it would be impossible to effectively recreate inheritance with clever contracts. I'm telling you that you're wrong. It would be trivial in any world where contracts and transfer of ownership are accepted to recreate an inheritance system.

[Eridrus]

We should probably get rid of the charity tax exemption above a small threshold anyway.

[JoeAltmaier]

It doesn't take charity to hold property in common. Or shares in a corporation with a nominal value of $1. No gift is required I think.