[Wolfenstein98k]

No one has ever prevented intergenerational wealth, and it is so innate and natural to humans that you're bordering on Soviet territory when you decide to fight all that and try and end it.

(If you're just talking about reducing it that's fine, but we already do that massively with the tax and transfer system, and I think you guys have estate taxes too.)

[ntSean]

I suppose if I were to suggest a 70% tax - you might think that too would bordering on a Soviet policy?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/high-income-earners-tax-ra...

Taxes are so nominal, that the haircut is almost non-existent. Beyond theory, I’m very well aware as my close friend inherited a property portfolio, and is now set for life.

Unfortunately, most are not as lucky, and therefore we should not rely on the inheritance lottery to act as our social security.

[germandiago]

Reducing it should also be forbidden in my opinion.

We should not be entitled to steal the effort of others. Every person can do what they deem right with their things.

It is not a matter of how much. By that reasoning I could make legal hitting people, even if it is bad, as long as I do not kill anyone. Would that make hitting people better? I do not think so. The action is still hitting.

The same way, the action is still stealing wealth for whatever reasons. Not a right choice.

[dreinhardt]

In a finite world of limited resources, how couldn’t it be a question of how much?

[nyokodo]

> In a finite world of limited resources

Resources are indeed finite, but value is not. The wealth of new ideas, figurative and literal, is practically infinite. Your statement sounds very much like the zero sum fallacy.

[germandiago]

It is not the main question. Why? Because not all wealth is done by resource-intensive business. Developed countries rely a lot on services not only primary and secondary sector.

Also, by having more offer available, prices are dropped. That benefits everyone, making them automatically wealthier, since now services are at the reach of more people at a lower price.

I do not see the problem. At least, not so far.

Indiscriminate redistribution by force has a long history of failure and it makes places poorer, not wealthier.

[elzbardico]

It doesn’t matter what we think is right. The more the people who have, have more than the people who doesn’t have, the closer we are to a time when the don’t haves will say: “fuck that, I was born in the same world as you, why should you have all the nice things just because you were born to the right parents.

Só, the choice is simple: you can pay more taxes now, or just hope that the masses won’t do a revolution and send you to the guillotine all the while you scream about your god given constitutional rights to property.

[germandiago]

Or alternatively a revolution can be done the other way around: effort is a holy thing. It cannot be stolen.

Or people who provide services go to the strike and stop producing. What would happen?

[elzbardico]

Yeah. Keep believing that. It worked so well to the Romanovs

[germandiago]

Dreaming is free. Lol! I want a world where what a rich did or what a homeless received voluntarily from someone has the same value: it cannot be stolen on any basis. No matter the explanation, justification, good will they explain they have and what they will do with it. You earn something, you manage it. You want something, you deal.

[jz391]

Bolsheviks are not a great example of a success story to bring up in support of your argument...

[elzbardico]

I am not telling the Bolshevik are right or that they are a success story, what I am telling is that no matter the actual fairness of stuff, if you don’t help your society eventually they will take our things by force. Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society

[HWR_14]

Estate taxes apply to less than 2,000 estates. And, by the way, as soon as you enter that you don't pay capital gains taxes. Meanwhile, those taxes are avoided in a thousand ways.

[VictorPath]

Until 10000 years ago, there was no such thing as intergenerational wealth or surplus, everyone was a migratory hunter gatherer before that owning what they carried. Some people in the Amazon still live like this.

So the notion that massive intergenerational wealth is innate to humans and natural is absurd. Or if it is innate and natural, then the lack of that is innate and natural as well. Most of behavioral modernity had none of this at all, it is a relatively new phenomenon, not "innately human".

[germandiago]

There is one thing that is innate. I can tell you.

I saw it from my nephews recently. One was building a castle, like five floors high with some stuff. The younger kid comes and destroys it. His brother gets deeply annoyed and started to cry. Why? Because he spent time building it.

They are three and one years old. Do you think anyone taught them to get annoyed when the castle is destroyed? No, it is innate: what takes effort has a value for humans.

We did not have the level of wealth of today before, but every single human that puts time somewhere wants to be the ruler of that effort. That is innate I think. I saw it clearly with my nephew's reaction. Noone taught him that.

Looks like a good experiment to me.

[ntSean]

Your experiment speaks to how we interpret transgressions, and for that, it is true- taxes are seen as robbery.

Does your nephew now own the sand he used to build that castle? I would hope not, as I think we’d agree, many kids would suffer!

And likewise, many people believe so strongly in their ownership of money, that they don’t mind if others suffer.

[germandiago]

> taxes are seen as robbery

Taxes are robbery. If you did the same to your neighbor under threat, you would end up in jail. If a mafia does that, they go to jail.

If the government does it, they do not. And they did not ask you to adhere to a contract. It works with reversed logic from what we do in real life with others.

There is no single logical justification to say it is not robbery. That is independent of whether what they do with that money is good or bad. A different discussion.

> And likewise, many people believe so strongly in their ownership of money.

Which represents just that you offered something worth that money to others, in the absense of threat or violence. So yes, now it belongs to them because of an exchange.

> that they don’t mind if others suffer.

Or even worse, some people subtract that money from us by providing no value, unlike the average of humans who at least sells something or provides a service and pretends that the people providing services or products are worse than the person subtracting in exchange of nothing under the threat of prison.

Also, it seems that to you the person being subtracted the money they earned and spent time to get it(could be money or anything else, I am talking about effort) do not suffer. I guess they do not have a soul or feelings or do not deserve the same respect as the others.

[HWR_14]

> Taxes are robbery.

I'm fine with you not paying taxes, as long as you leave my country and renounce your citizenship. After that, make whatever you want on a boat in the ocean or in Somalia. But no one who thinks taxes are theft ever does that, because they want all the benefits of society my taxes pay for.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Why renounce citizenship? I have several citizenships, and only US asks for my money while I reside elsewhere and don't consume any of its "services".

[germandiago]

I am not asking to be provided services I do not pay for.

I am not claiming I should have roads and health care and all and that taxes are theft at the same time. I am saying that taxes are theft on the basis that noone asked me what to pay or not.

The proof that things are terribly managed, at least in my country (Spain), is that we have a 120% GDP debt.

We are making new-born be born with a debt. Is that the right thing to do? For me that is immoral, unless you are that kind of person that thinks that we do a default and done, which would mean you are not a person that has a word to be believed. So what are the alternatives?

[vimax]

You seem to be saying that anything short of living your philosophical ideals is hypocrisy.

There are a lot of government policies I think should be criminal, but nobody suggests that my only options are accept the policy or completely denounce society.

I think that the large telecoms are built on theft from society and that copyright laws are too extensive. Should I leave society to go live on Sealand?

[germandiago]

I would pay for my services, happily. Give me alternatives and tell me prices. And let me choose what I use. Do not tax me on the basis of "take this pack I chose" and I set the price and you must pay.

[gitgrump]

This Randian view of taxes is exhausting. If taxation is theft, then you're complicit every time you drive on a road. For the sake of your conscience, the only moral thing to do is to move into the woods and depend on nothing and nobody.

Good luck.

[germandiago]

Why? I can imagine a toll on roads and being paid per use. Why they do not do that? Ah, yes, because that would mean there is not justification for these people to exist, like with many other things.

The duty of the governments is to kidnap and monopolize services on the basis that you owe them something because they provided you that, when, in fact, there are alternatives.

But even if they were useful on their own right, you could optionally pay or not in the taxes (that would not be taxes actually) and acquire or lose the right to use certain services.

Why they do not do that, and later accuse you of bad citizen wanting people to die, to not have education or that you cannot use roads? Because they are desperate to justify their own existence and by kidnapping these services they have their justification to exist.

[ntSean]

> There is no single logical justification to say it is not robbery

It is the cost to you living in society; a society which provides infrastructure such as roads, education, sanitation, and food. A society which provides customers and a marketplace to trade in.

The roller coaster of watching you add and edit this comment was truly an experience. Have a great day.

[germandiago]

This would be true if they came and tell me which services I am willing to pay and use. That is not what they do. What they do is to pack all things together, to extract money from there for them also, to make systems with way too many people to manage stuff that can be managed more efficiently and to pass you the bill without asking.

Of course that is robbery. Imagine they force you to eat in a certain restarant and you must eat there, because they decided so without asking. Now let us say the food should be 15 dollars and they charge you 45, without asking. This is what they do. It is totally, totally unfair.

Later they will come and tell you: hey, you can eat thanks to me! You owe me respect. When in fact, I could have gone find my own way and eat for 15. It is absurd. And robbery, of course. Noone asked me. That is illegal if you do it to someone.

It is as if a telco came and charge you a bill of 50 usd and you get mad and go and say: hey, I did not hire your services. And they reply: the contract is implicit. They would be in trouble.

[thrashh]

Somewhere can’t be robbery if you continue to permit it everyday… if you actually believed your words, you’d move to the middle of nowhere with no Internet and electricity or roads.

And it’s not robbery if you’re getting something from it everyday, which you clearly are because you’re posting on the Internet and drinking clean water.

[b3nji]

I'm not sure what country you are from, but my taxes to the government certainly don't pay my internet provider or water supply company...

[germandiago]

You shifted the topic. I do not mean to not drink clean water or to not use roads.

My point is to have control on what to pay or not. When not paying, of course, I have to pay it by myself. But noone is entitled to tell me how much and in which conditions unilaterally.

Governments and stated should NOT be an exception.

[lloydgrossman]

>Taxes are robbery.

You're anti fire department?

[germandiago]

No, I just try to be objective here. From Cambridge dictionary. Steal:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/steal

"to take something without the permission or knowledge of the owner and keep it"

As far as I know, they do not have my permission to get my wealth.

From RAE, in Spanish, robar:

"Quitar o tomar para sí con violencia o con fuerza lo ajeno." -> To extract or remove for oneself with violence or force other people's property (ajeno in this context refers to property in spanish)

So yes, it is an objective definition of what stealing is, because you pay under the threat of jail, not by mutual agreement, as you do when you purchase something.

https://dle.rae.es/robar

"

[dwaltrip]

Pre-agricultural tribes could have had forms of wealth — an ornate spear or knife, a prized shawl, a special ceremonial bowl, etc — that they passed down.

It seems quite likely to me that as soon as we started crafting and carrying things around, we developed complex behaviors around who gets which things.

[HWR_14]

Frequently those things were buried with the people who made them.

[inglor_cz]

It is not really possible to determine who made the grave goods found next to a skeleton (or urn). Some specialization of work is seen in hunters and gatherers already. Not everyone makes their own spearheads or cotton strings etc.

[sokoloff]

I suspect that whatever wealth they did have was carefully passed to the next generation and, further, that people who didn’t do that were less likely to have their DNA represented in the modern human pool.