Two hard working people are born in poverty. They each work hard and reap the rewards of their success. They both pay income tax on their gains. One of the people spends their lifetime of accrued wealth on themselves, buying a nice car, a huge house, and luxury goods they don't really need. The other person is concerned about the future of their only child and lives well below their means, when they die they will their estate to their child who immediately stops working and never works again. Is that fair?
Now consider a third person who also cares for their child. This person also lives frugally but instead of saving their wealth every year they buy their kid fancy cars and luxury goods. They die penniless but their kid never had to work a day in their life. Is that fair?
It confuses work ethic with fairness. It works because we incorrectly associate good work ethic with positive outcomes. This is a particular to our current time and place in society and we should be very cautious when attempting to universalize it.
It would be good to reframe it with consequentialism in mind to reveal the unspoken truths of the examples.
> Two hard working people are born in poverty. They each work hard and reap the rewards of their success. They both pay income tax on their gains. One of the people spends their lifetime of accrued wealth on themselves, buying a nice car, a huge house, and luxury goods they don't really need. The other person is concerned about the future of their only child and lives well below their means, when they die they will their estate to their child who immediately stops working and never works again. Is that fair?
Ten generations later, the descendants of the first person have all been able to expand their wealth purely due to the wealth that their ancestor had. None of them have had to work hard for generations, but they all vigorously defend their right to give their wealth to their kids without taxes so that they also don't have to work hard. Meanwhile, the descendants of the second person are unable to acquire wealth due to the advantage that people like the first person have in controlling capital, and they all work menial jobs for people like the first person. Is that fair?
No, it isn’t fair but that can be avoided by adding friction to wealth via an annual wealth tax, and then only applying it on the largest (100m+) fortunes. I don’t think anyone thinks someone who works hard and saves shouldn’t be able to pass on a few million, or even tens of millions, to their descendant. But what you refer to is equally true - no one but the beneficiaries agree that someone should be born into monstrous wealth and be able to sustain generation after generation on the basis only of winning the ovarian lottery.
I, personally, would have a tax of 100% on all wealth over $100m.
I limited my hypotheticals to a single generation because I was interested in learning specifically what it is about inheritence that people find unfair.
Your response would seem to posit a different set of questions, namely should capital be used to make decisions for society and does a concentration of capital force those without to work a lifetime of menial jobs?
I'm less interested in addressing these questions since I've heard a lot about them before and I think it will take us on a further tangent from the original discussion. But I will just say that I see no difference between a first generation person who doesn't work and a tenth generation person who doesn't work beyond perhaps an abstract greater disconnection from the rest of society and the concept of hard working. And that for capital to have influence over society it must be deployed which carries with it the risk of losing said capital.
I'm not sure how you can separate the question about inheritance fairness from multiple generations other than in a very abstract sense because I think the unfairness is most often perceived with wealth that is so great that it will last beyond just the immediate heirs lifetimes. An inheritance of $10,000 is likely not going to last long enough to be passed on to one's own children, but an inheritance of hundreds of millions is presumably not going to be entirely used up in one generation.
Why does the number of generations that can free ride matter? If Warren Buffett can make 100 billion dollars in a single generation then he can skew society today. How would it be any different if he'd inherited it from his parents? Or his great great great to the nth grandparents? If there is a problem with concentrated wealth why is it more of a problem if it took a long time to accrue or to deplete or if it was accrued 200 years ago or this morning?
Let's say that there are three tables being used for playing Monopoly. Each of these games is played between a player designated A and a player designated B. At table 1, the game is played under standard rules. At table 2, the game is played with the standard rules, except at the end of the game, all of the money that the winning player has is given to player A in addition to their regular starting amount. At table 3, the same rules are played as at table 2, except that money is only passed on to player A in games where they did not start with additional extra money from the previous game.
Each table plays 10,000 games, and then the number of wins for each player are counted. Which table do you expect to have the greatest difference in the number of wins between players A and B, and which would you expect to have the least difference in wins between players A and B? I'd consider the table with the least expected difference of wins to be the most "fair", and the table with the greatest expected difference to be the least fair. My hypothesis is that table 1 would be the most fair, followed by table 3, and then table 2 would be the least fair.
Translating this to inheritance in the real world, I think being able to give an advantage to one's descendants for 10 generations is less fair than being able to give it to only one generation. In the context of something like an estate tax, I could imagine something like an implementation where accepting an inheritance incurs a higher tax rate on any money bequeathed up to the amount you inherited. For example, if I inherit $1,000,000 over my lifetime and then leave $5,000,000 to my heir, maybe the first $1,000,000 might incur an extra 10% tax, but then the remaining $4,000,000 is taxed at the regular rate. For something like this to be seriously implemented, I expect that it might need do account for more things (e.g. adjustment for inflation), but at least as far as I can see it seems like a pretty reasonable idea. It's possible that something like this already exists though!
It would take an extraordinary amount of discipline to maintain that wealth ten generations down the line. “Rags to rags in three generations” is a saying for a reason.
I think the answer is to treat capital gains and dividends the same as ordinary employment income and subject to the same tax rates. Perhaps introduce a sub-1% wealth tax per annum on very large fortunes (100m+) to add friction that the wealthy have to work to counteract.
*and to treat loans against capital assets as taxable income. Otherwise we’ll keep seeing the wealthy avoid taxation by loaning against their assets. So long as rates stay relatively low.
Now consider a third person who also cares for their child. This person also lives frugally but instead of saving their wealth every year they buy their kid fancy cars and luxury goods. They die penniless but their kid never had to work a day in their life. Is that fair?