[nwah1]

Fascintating piece of history. The inspiration behind the game Monopoly was an attempt to educate people on the immoral nature of the current landownership paradigm. But interestingly, it is based on the same original classical liberal arguments that spawned free market philosophy.

[thedudeabides5]

Kind of like how crypto was started as a reaction to broken financial institutions and is now being marketed as a get rich quick scheme.

Sometimes we become what we set out or destroy.

[hnick]

> marketed as a get rich quick scheme

I am seeing bus stop ads here in Sydney with a tagline from a BTC exchange saying something like "If you're seeing bitcoin on a billboard, it's time to buy".

Now I'm hardly an astute investor but I thought the usual rule is that if your cabbie starts talking about it, it's time to get out of the market.

[Spooky23]

Definitely true. During the big silver run a few years ago, the owner of a local Lebanese restaurant made an investment in a solid silver statue of his late dog. That was the sign of the near peak.

I think crypto has plenty of run left. It’s still a pain to buy. When your dentist is loading up his 401k with Bitcoin ETFs, that’s going to be the peak.

[DonHopkins]

Reminds me of a billboard I saw in the London tube once, with the big bold title "BEAT THE CROWDS" over a photo of lots of people crowded uncomfortably together on the platform. I wasn't sure if it was encouraging people to get up early and commute to their jobs, or to get a job with the police hitting lots of people with billy clubs. Either way, it was about crowd control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sztf4hcGrB4&ab_channel=WestL...

It is said that the people are revolting!

You said it. They stink on ice!

[sneak]

> Now I'm hardly an astute investor but I thought the usual rule is that if your cabbie starts talking about it, it's time to get out of the market.

My stripper friends first started asking me if they should buy cryptocurrencies in 2017. Had you bought btc at the $17k it was priced then, you'd have more than tripled your money in the following four years.

[SuoDuanDao]

Well now, sex workers were early adopters of crypto across the board. I don't think that's an example of the 'cabbie rule', they were probably more interested in the technology than most who buy.

[mrits]

If your cabbie understands BTC you might have a point. We aren't even close to there yet

[throwawaywrench]

>the usual rule is that if your cabbie starts talking about it, it's time to get out of the market.

>If your cabbie understands BTC you might have a point. We aren't even close to there yet

The point is that the cabbie likely doesn't understand BTC. When an asset class becomes so popular that people who have no idea how it works are putting money into it and loudly campaigning for others to do the same that is a sign that you are in a bubble.

It doesn't necessarily mean that the bubble is about to pop. Some bubbles can last decades. See real estate in a variety of locations around the world as an example. However lot of dumb money (people who don't understand what they're buying) flowing into a thing because of fomo can be a predictor that prices are unsustainable.

[mrits]

"When an asset class becomes so popular that people who have no idea how it works are putting money into it and loudly campaigning for others to do the same that is a sign that you are in a bubble."

It absolutely isn't a sign a of a bubble. There aren't many people that understand what they are investing in be it currency or Google. The success of the investment has nothing to do with the cabbies understanding. Taking his advice does.

[junippor]

Understanding doesn't come into this. Most people don't understand money any farther than $5 + $5 = $10, and it still works really well. Unlike bitcoin.

[christphrdunder]

it's almost as if technical solutions can't solve problems with humans/humanity...

[rybosworld]

Breaking away from financial institutions and getting rich, are not mutually exclusive.

[LambdaComplex]

Even Adam Smith complained about landlords though.

[anonporridge]

Adam Smith also wanted inheritance mostly abolished except for the small amount necessary to continue supporting a man's wife and young children.

[midasuni]

Yes Smith was great. Why is inheritance moral? One person gets something for free, the other works and has to pay tax?

[OscarCunningham]

Someone's working in both cases. In the case of inheritance it's the person who gave the money in their will. That person also already paid tax when they earned the money in the first place.

If anything I think we should encourage rich people to give their money away (even if only to their children) since wealth consumed by a broader number of people leads to more happiness than if it's all consumed by one person. It's better for a $10 million fortune to be spent by 10 consecutive generations than for it to all be spent by the original owner.

[iso1631]

I pay tax when I earn money, I then give it to my mechanic to service my car, and I pay more tax on that, he then pays tax on the money I give him.

Why should inheritance be any different?

[OscarCunningham]

(I came back and edited this answer completely.)

The difference is that when you give money to your children, you're not getting any goods or services in exchange. The transaction is making them richer, but you poorer by the same amount.

(Also, later when the children pay a mechanic the amount of total tax paid will be the same.)

[croon]

> If anything I think we should encourage rich people to give their money away (even if only to their children) since wealth consumed by a broader number of people leads to more happiness than if it's all consumed by one person. It's better for a $10 million fortune to be spent by 10 consecutive generations than for it to all be spent by the original owner.

I don't understand how you reach this conclusion. If the original owner spends all of it it enters a whole lot of more peoples pockets than his kids.

[OscarCunningham]

Increasing the velocity of money doesn't help the world on average. Otherwise the Fed would just set their inflation target higher. Even if you disagree, given that the Fed has a fixed inflation target you can't do anything about it by changing inheritance tax. If you force a bunch of rich people to spend more than they would have, the Fed will just take that money straight back out of the economy.

Sometimes I find all this money swirling around difficult to keep track of. It's easier to forget about money and look at what's happening to the goods and services. Ten families in $1 million houses get more happiness than one family in a $10 million house and nine homeless families. No matter how you shuffle the accounting around it has to add up to that same utility difference.

[imtringued]

Assuming those savings are invested, it wouldn't change anything. Right now there is an excess of uninvested savings in corporations that is not being invested and sure, distributing that money would help with the economy but betting on inheritance taxes to do the job is weird. It's too unreliable.

[jusssi]

Many places in the world you pay a tax for inheritance.

For 100% (or otherwise significant) inheritance tax, the issue is how to implement it. If you know it's happening, you'll just gift what you own to the preferred recipients before you die. If gifts are also 100% taxed, you sell your property to them (and then spring up a company and hire them to do "work", so they get the money back). If sale of property and work are 100% taxed, well, it's a very different kind of economy.

100% inheritance tax only hurts when someone dies unexpectedly. Others will be prepared with workarounds.

Where I live, both inheritance and gifts are taxed with very similar rates. Also, selling things under their market value is considered gifting (which sometimes gets interesting, for obvious reasons).

[kuang_eleven]

This is something I've certainly thought about, as another proponent of as-high-as-possible inheritance taxes.

What about taking inheritance and gifts as ordinary income to the recipient? Ideally this would be coupled with a reform on capital gains tax, but even as is, should target high taxes only on large amounts or amounts given to people that are already rich.

There would certainly need to be some tweaks, but it should diminish the inherent injustice of inheritance.

[killtimeatwork]

> If you know it's happening, you'll just gift what you own to the preferred recipients before you die.

You can treat all gifts a year or less before the date of death as inheritance. Many wealthy parents will be hesitant to give large amounts of money to children while in good health, as they're scared children won't care about them any more once they get their money.

[jusssi]

So as a parent, you gift the money to your children on the condition that they lend it all back to you until your death. If the children don't behave up to your expectations, you'll just spend it all on booze and hookers^w^w^w really expensive elder care and be insolvent by the time you die.

The bottom line is, if someone wants to leave a significant inheritance to their (grand)children, there's little that can be done about it with tax policies only. By the time you have plugged all the holes to prevent inheritance, you've also prevented most of the things we consider necessary for the function of a capitalist free economy.

[imtringued]

>Why is inheritance moral?

Because we do not want to isolate children from their parents. A 100% inheritance tax is impossible from a practical standpoint.

>One person gets something for free,

Do you abandon your child as soon as it is born? Do you think your newborn should work and pay the bills? No, you support it for 18 years and let it grow as much as possible instead of considering your child something to be exploited for money.

> the other works and has to pay tax?

If you inherit something from someone, that person had to work and pay tax.

I can come up with good reasons for wealth taxes, I can come up with good reasons for abolishment of land ownership (replaced by a permanent lease model) or heavy taxation of land but I honestly cannot come up with any reason for inheritance taxes beyond jealousy, jealousy that other people had more fortunate parents than you and your selfish desire to drag them down. If everyone started off on an empty earth it would be fair, but it also would be equally bad for everyone, instead of bad for an unlucky minority. Being poor in the US is a blessing, being poor in India is not.

Especially when there is a fair solution to the wealth inequality problem. Simply split the wealth instead of giving it all to the first born son. If people are obscenely wealthy, let them have many children and let each of those children be less wealthy than their parents. If you must implement this with a tax, then set a maximum amount that a single person can receive through inheritance in a lifetime, say $1 billion and tax anything after that. Yes, that means Jeff Bezos will have to find 200 heirs or lose the money to the state. It would be in his best interest to reduce wealth inequality at the end of his life.

[marbletiles]

You went from “I cannot think of any reason for inheritance tax” to ... proposing an inheritance tax (at a very high threshold) in the space of a paragraph.

Untaxed inheritance perpetuates inequality. Inequalities are unfair and arguably damage our societies. Functioning societies aim to repair the damage by rebalancing structural inequalities. Hence inheritance tax. The children of the very wealthy aren’t being “abandoned”, they already have surpassing advantages while their parents are alive.

[zo1]

Well if you want to ask why inheritance is moral you should probably also ask why taxes are moral because taxing/abolishing inheritance is a logical extension to that. I urge us all to sit and think about it for a few moments. What are the logical steps and sequence of justifications that led us from a bunch of random people in the middle of nowhere to a point where there is now an entity that [forceably] takes X% of people's labor, by virtue of birth in that entity's area and nothing else? If government didn't have this "aura" of legitimacy and "democracy" attached to it, what it does would be seen as no different to what lords did to their peasants centuries ago. By virtue of a peasant being born on a lord's land, they were subject to their rules. At least back then they could probably leave and go to the middle of nowhere and be left alone if you weren't harming anyone. These days there is nowhere to go, and in some cases the "government" might not even let you leave!

Centuries from now they'll probably consider what we're doing now to be absolutely barbaric and adjacent to plain old slavery.

[imtringued]

I'll bite. Governments are virtual machines, aka language runtimes, they provide a baseline for human cooperation by creating the rule of law and a political environment within which an advanced economy can exist. They can only provide these things because they conquered land via a military and protect the land and its citizens from intruders.

You can argue that there are ways of taxation that are compatible with this idea and there are ways of taxation that are counterproductive but you cannot argue that the taxes shouldn't exist because that would mean no government which would mean no rule of law and no political environment in which an advanced economy can exist. Of course, the big problem is that many governments fail to live up to their responsibility. The US and EU countries' government may be failing their citizens, but not as much as many Asian, African or Latin American governments.

[iso1631]

Taxes are moral because taxes fund the society which allows us to live. You can debate about the level of taxation, what to tax (labour vs capital vs natural assets) and what functions that society should provide, but there are very few people claiming that national defense, or courts, or city streets, should not be funded from the public purse.

[Kbelicius]

Reading your logic here one would think that your musings have lead you to become an anti-capitalist but for some reason this texts strikes me as if it was written by somebody who's far from that position.

[HeadsUpHigh]

So tax inheritance?

[hkt]

In the UK pro-inheritance folks like to call it a "death tax" and argue it'll rob people of the ability to pass things along to their children. The debate is caustic and unpleasant to say the least.

[FabHK]

I believe opponents call it "death tax" in the US as well. The progressive linguist George Lakoff has analysed this framing issue in depth.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/who-framed-george-lakoff/

[pydry]

They castigated land value tax as "the garden tax" too.

[kqr]

Something a lot of commenters seem to be missing is that in Adam Smith's time, inheritance meant primogeniture. In other words, the eldest son receives all land, which is indivisible and belongs to the eldest son only. (Who is socially obliged to support the other people in the family as needed.)

This ties up a lot of wealth in ways which slow down economic growth immensely.

[FredPret]

Maybe he hung up a painting and didn’t get his deposit back

[llamaimperative]

“Immoral” is one dimension, but more importantly it’s to educate on the failure-prone nature of land ownership. It causes markets to seize up and capital to flow to rent seekers and away from those who deploy capital (capitalists) or generate it (laborers).