[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> Its hard for me to imagine being so full of envy that you would like to see the children of rich people stripped of everything they have.

I think you misread the sentiment. What a lot of us would like to see is a more meritocratic system, where children start off on more equal footing and either earn their wealth or not. But inherited works against that. It is difficult to listen to arguments against taxing the wealthy heavily "because they earned it" while at the same time hearing support for what amounts to aristocracy.

[dahfizz]

Right, but you're trying to achieve your meritocracy by pulling people down instead of helping people up. This isn't a footrace, and it's not a zero sum game. When you say something like "we need to take money away from rich kids so they have to work like everyone else", you're doing nothing but harm. You may feel the people you're harming have it coming, but that's still what you're doing.

The idea that we have to come up with a good reason _not_ to heavily tax people is backwards. The only reason you need is that people have rights. A man owns what is his and you have absolutely no right to it.

This is all beside the pont anyway. Increasing tax revenue will not solve any of the problems you are trying to solve. As I said elsewhere, you could tax 100% of every billionaire in this country, leaving them homeless, and you would not have collected enough money to fund the federal government for even one year. You could sell off your entire "aristocracy" and it wouldn't make a dent. The strategy of "just spend more money" does not work.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> Right, but you're trying to achieve your meritocracy by pulling people down instead of helping people up.

And how are we to do that without taking money from somewhere and using it to help people up?

> The idea that we have to come up with a good reason _not_ to heavily tax people is backwards. The only reason you need is that people have rights. A man owns what is his and you have absolutely no right to it.

Case in point. You can't take money away from rich kids via inheritance tax (nevermind that they'd still have innumerable advantages from growing up in a wealthy household), you can't tax the wealthy, but you're somehow supposed to help poor children up anyway. Who's paying for that?

Furthermore, I disagree with the statement on the grounds that national infrastructure and protections are doubtless large contributors to anyone being able to amass that kind of wealth in the first place, therefore it is not unreasonable to expect that a portion of that wealth be contributed back.

[criticaljudge]

Children already start of pretty well in most parts of the world. Every child gets an education, for example.

I think you would find that to make everything equal, you would have to take children away from their parents at an early age. Because having caring, loving parents is also an advantage. At least so far not all kids in a school turn out the same, even thought they all have the same teachers and lessons. Must be the parents that make the difference.

I don't think that would be desirable. I don't want my children to be raised in a government institution to make them exactly the same as everybody else, just for the sake of an arbitrary metric ("equality" measured in some arbitrarily chosen terms).

In fact why not get rid of parents altogether, and create children in labs? I bet that is the socialist dream fulfilled.