| > Monopoly is an extremely crude model of the real world. Monopoly was just an example of a game with currency at the start; you could pick pretty much any other game with a similar mechanic. > To strain the analogy further, why are you always transferring wins to player A? A better model is to just let both players keep whatever they have at the end of each game and use it to start the next game. The reason I said to transfer to player A was merely to make it easier to express the inequality; think of player A not as a family line so much as "the set of people who have inheritances" versus "the set of people who don't". That's also why I don't think it matters whether the person is dead or not; my point is showing that having inheritance continue to affect games beyond the immediate one after is significantly different than limiting it to one generation. > But none of this matters because Monopoly is not real life. Yeah, I don't think anyone would disagree with this, but the point here is that having previous games affects later ones can give significant advantages and disadvantages, and this result is independent of the game. > The wealthy used to amass real physical resources; ores, livestock, land, people... Now we mostly have them chasing digital zeroes in a bank account. It really is much better. So some people buy a yacht every now and again? That's great! Yachtmakers have a reason to go to work every day and the world keeps spinning. I have no idea what this has to do with the discussion at all. Whether digital assets or physical ones are passed on via inheritance doesn't change whether or not starting with extra resources is an advantage or not. I definitely don't think that anyone is arguing that they think the problem with inheritance is that people can buy yachts? > If you think there should be a cap on the total amount of zeroes anyone can hold at one time I totally get where you're coming from, but I don't get the obsession with taking a cut when someone dies beyond the normal cut we take when people just transfer wealth to eachother because a clever person will just make a
plan to do this before they die and that is unfair to folks that aren't so clever. We have taxes on people giving money to each other directly when alive as well. You can't just give someone $1 million while you're alive to avoid them having to pay taxes on it. If by "clever" you mean "avoiding taxes", then yes, I do think this also shouldn't be allowed, and I don't think I'd be opposed to having the tax rate be similar to the estate tax. From my perspective, the "obsession" is from people who seem to be from people _against_ allowing taxes on estates (using pejorative language like "death tax"[1] to try to derail the discussion). I don't feel the need to as strongly defend sales tax or income tax because there are far fewer people who argue that they shouldn't exist at all, but if the political will to abolish income tax reached similar levels of support to opposition to the estate tax, then I would focus more on it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State... |