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by waterhouse
1159 days ago
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> Your heirs may own the chair, but inheritance itself is also a legal construct. If inheritance didn't exist, I imagine people would achieve a similar result by gifting everything to their heirs towards the end of their life. And there would be cases where someone meant to do so but died earlier than expected, or where someone did so when they thought they were dying but then ended up living 10 years longer. Compared to that world, inheritance with wills is more convenient and orderly for everyone involved, but it is not the thing that enables people to pass things on to heirs. |
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The state's monopoly on violence, and the rule of law it allows, is definitely the thing that enables people to pass things on to their designated heirs. Otherwise, every dispute between heirs, every contested will, every contested end-of-life "gift" would carry the potential for bloodshed.
The specific laws that we have right now could be written differently, and things like inheritance could work differently, but you cannot escape the fact that they are all just creatures of the human mind.
That is, until those concepts begin to be encoded in and enforced by machines.