[jacobolus]

Large inheritances are inherently unjust. Citizens should not be accumulating dynastic aristocratic fortunes. Small groups of people should not – based on accidents of history – end up inheriting the accumulated wealth of the whole society.

This is not about opposition to private property. I’m fine if people own a house, or a family farm, or a small business, or even a controlling stake in a large business they built from nothing. (Though it would be great if at that point the public had transparency into their self-serving political activities.)

But passing billions (and the derived political power) down to descendants several generations removed who did nothing themselves to deserve it is ultimately a recipe for a deeply broken society. It creates perverse incentives away from long-term thinking towards large-scale fraud and abuse, and entrenches the political influence of an aristocratic class whose primary goal is to maintain their fortunes rather than contribute to the society.

[onetimeusename]

Why are they unjust? I don't see how wealth transferring from one person to another is the same as "inheriting the accumulated wealth of the whole society". Did the heirs also steal everyone else's things when the wealth was passed on? How does that happen?

[codyb]

If inequality is very high (say 1% own 40% of the resources), and a child inherits almost a percentage of the _entire society’s wealth_ just by birth then that select group of inheritances is receiving incredible portions of the accumulated wealth of society by birth becomes an aristocracy.

Thats how I read GP.

[onetimeusename]

Yes that's true, but the actual percentage of ownership hasn't changed, it stays the same. But the bigger issue is that the economy is not really a finite thing. Owning a certain amount of land, maybe by inheritance is not the same as owning a never changing percentage of all the resources. A good counter example might be something like inheriting shares of Google, or Amazon. Those people might never have owned any significant percentage of land but that did not stop them from owning something else that is more valuable than the land. So the resources change over time and I don't really see why land ownership is being used as a proxy for everything. Now, also, you may have not been making that point yourself but just clarifying. I just want to talk people down from the land confiscation movement because it seems destructive and pointless.

[FakeComments]

Yes, but that’s not being realistic.

1% of 1 million people is 10,000 people, who will be roughly half kids and young adults — the heirs.

So you’re talking 0.00008% of the wealth being passed down, roughly. That’s still pretty unequal in a society with a lot of people, but I’m also not sure smashing any granule of accumulated wealth leads to a vibrant society — the inter generational transfer of structures is essential for culture.

Capitalism is fundamentally just highly mobile aristocracy, though — and that may be the best we can do.

[robocat]

> So you’re talking 0.00008%

The ownership is probably a power law. If you did a simple "averaging" division, that makes no sense.

[raducu]

In a perfect world where the rich pay proper taxes, monopolies and corruption does not exist, it would not be unjust.

It used to be a principle in ancient times that one is not entitled to more land than one can deffend.

[onetimeusename]

So there are a couple issues here. Taxes(on the rich), economic opportunity(from monopolies and corruption), land ownership, and implicitly a notion of fairness and these all become merged in to one issue but I don't think they really are all the same at all.

Land ownership seems like a much more mundane part of the economy actually but it is being equated with the entire economy. So what does land ownership have to do with monopolies, corruption, and the rich paying proper taxes? What are proper taxes for the rich to pay?

To me the land ownership issue is being used as a wedge to reinforce a different idea that a tiny percentage of people have economically disenfranchised everyone else. I really don't think land ownership should be equated with that however. At this point, the argument is very different. It's gone from why we should confiscate people's land to what tax rates should be, or who the "rich" are, or why real estate prices are what they are. To me the land confiscation case seems like scapegoating of landowners for things like real estate prices or economic inequality.

[AnimalMuppet]

> Large inheritances are inherently unjust.

Really? I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust.

> But passing billions (and the derived political power) down to descendants several generations removed who did nothing themselves to deserve it is ultimately a recipe for a deeply broken society.

I actually don't disagree with this. But we're talking about England here, and even if you stop the money, you still have the class structure and the connections, which still lead to political power.

But even more, while I agree that the problem is real, I disagree with your solution. "Lets just take it from them, and give it to those who have less" is such a seductive dream, but it destroys societies and economies where it is tried.

[jacobolus]

Yes, the accumulated wealth of society is “the people’s” stuff, and it is unjust for the few to take it and hoard it indefinitely.

[sumedh]

> I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust.

You have people like Buffett, Gates even Andrew Carnegie and many other billionaires saying that their wealth should go back to society instead of their kids, are they all wrong?

[reallydude]

> I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust.

Saying it's your stuff, is the misnomer. It was found by your because it was someone else's stuff, but there's supposed to be some moral virtue of you receiving it, because you benefited from it during your upbringing.

Being offended by a perceived slight in Procedural justice is a matter of circumstance - ie altering the principles you were born under for Distributive justice, even if you don't think it's as equitable based on your experience. From a pragmatic point of view, inheritance causes Capitalism to fall into anarchy in the long term...making it inherently immoral, as a practice. Unless you want to dispense with capitalism, in which case it's still immoral to a lesser degree (lesser evil against a greater evil).

[imtringued]

It doesn't sound like the inheritance is the problem but the concentrstion of power. A simple and fair solution would be to not allow a single person to inherit more than 50% of the wealth of their parent! Therefore every generation splits the wealth among two or more people which leads to a reduction in wealth concentration.

[sumedh]

> A simple and fair solution would be to not allow a single person to inherit more than 50% of the wealth of their parent!

Pass that law and nothing would change, the money would go to some offshore bank account which is owned by a secret trust controlled by the kid.

[petre]

Lenin took that statement to the next level and caused the Bolshevik Revolution. We all know how that fared. Now the oligarchs de facto own Russia.

[raducu]

But that's just one extreme example.

In romanian history I know 2 positive examples where land was confiscated and redistributed with positive effects: one by Alexandru Ioan Cuza who confiscated most land owned by church(roughly 25% of the country) and another instance during ww1 when the King decreted every peasant fighting in the war will be alloted land by the state.

Nothing bad came from that, the people were already working the land, they just got to take home the fruits of their labor more.

[nickpp]

Of course, you are conveniently forgetting a much more recent example of land redistribution from Romanian history: the forced collectivization after the WW2.

The effects were predictably horrifying, with families starving while their land was forcibly taken and misused by people more friendly with the new system.

Because when the state CAN take everything from you, it's up the "wise statesmen" if the taking is for the good or for the bad of the society. You have no saying it is, but one thing is for sure: it’s bad for you and always good for said statesmen and their tools.

[raducu]

But the collectivisation was the exact opposite: it took land from everybody and gave it to the state.

My point was, land/wealth redistribution, can and often is a good thing, it's not a sacrilege that aytomatically ends in dissaster as some die-hards make it to be.

[nickpp]

Everybody?! The communist propaganda was very careful to underline that they only took from those "who had too much" to give to those "who needed" for the "betterment of everybody".

Too bad if you (dirt poor and uneducated) went to fight in WW1 to get some land and then spent the years after WW1 working that land like crazy to buy more land because you believed that gave your children a better chance in life than you had.

Because that's what happens when you don't have principles (like "private property is sacred") and you replace them instead with nebulous beliefs that sometimes it's OK to steal from others, as long as they have more than you do and you get some of that booty.

[petre]

That was just propaganda. They took priate property away from everyone that had something. Even if you had two cows, they took that away and made it state property. The process is quite nicely illustrated in the Morometii sequel that came out last year:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9203168/

[petre]

That's still the work of the USSR. The communists siezed power in Romania under Russian occupation after WW2. The recipe was similar to what Putin used in Crimeea some years ago but at least there they had some popular support whereas in Romania they used intimidation and massive election fraud.

[nickpp]

The people digging in my grand parent's garden to find&take their hidden winter children clothes and provisions were 100% Romanians, locals from that tiny village, previous lazy losers freshly empowered into dedicated tools of the communist regime.

[petre]

It was roughly the same during the French Revolution and giving public land to veterans is a practice since the Roman Empire. But in the USSR during Stalin, colectivised agricultural land amounted to 91%. The blosheviks took land from everyone who owned land, big or small. Add to that other private property such as livestock, means of production.

I agree that Cuza's secularisation of monastic estates was a good thing.

[snidane]

Land reforms and redistribution never work. It just disrupts the current social order, pisses off people from which the land has been taken, pisses off people who didn't get as much as their neighbor and eventually, roughly within 50 years, leads to similar social structure as before the reform. Only with different social class becoming the owners. The old aristocracy gets displaced by new oligarchic aristocracy. This has happened all over Eastern Europe.

The actual solution is capturing of the rent as the land value increases. The increase on land value is due to society contributing, but the beneficiary is the landlord sitting on it. Tax the consumer, not the producer of the value. Tax land, not labor and business.

The aristocratic power law society has to be broken in order to fix the system. Bolsheviks didn't understand this. Or they did and they organized the coup just to become the new bosses.

Without this understanding our society will still be very primitive and suffer from revolutions and aristocracy cycles. At least in ancient times they understood basic ethics in terms of ethics of ownership and how destructive debt was on a society. It seems like today we are blessed with all these new technologies but live more and more in some medieval dark age dystopia.

[mirimir]

The oligarchs are generally former Communist managers who cashed out as the Soviet Union crashed. So really not that different from William the Conqueror etc.