It's surprising to me that Europeans aren't more opposed to generational wealth. Didn't many countries fight multiple wars and revolutions to overthrow/re-instate the entrenched agrarian aristocracy? why would Europeans be comfortable allowing the Entrenchment of a modern aristocracy a hundred years later?
Brah most inheritance taxes a) don't start until you're in the several hundred thousand to millions range and b) are less than 100%.
So you can still leave a pretty large nest egg for your children. And if you really wanted to make sure they would be ok without you, you would have to pay for a good education and taught them the value of hard work. (And used your social network/connections to get them a good first job/seed money to start their own business)
Imagine working harder that you can possibly imagine to guarantee a good future for your children, and yet not being able to because the deck is stacked against you, or you're just unlucky - and having the state step in to at least give them a fair chance.
Then imagine someone saying that's bad because it's important for other people's kids to be able to live in luxury without ever having to work a day in their lives.
Imagine saying that you working hard, providing for your kids and doing good in life is less because someone else has it better/easier/"doesn't deserve it".
Imagine saying that the only way things can be fair is if you steal from others you think have too much to make things 'equal'.
I am not saying at all that it is "less" (in what way do you even imagine that?),
I am saying that in cases where it has nothing to do with working harder and everything with profiting off the work of others, which is invariably the case with multimillionaires, there must be a limit
If you're gonna play games with framing things as "stealing", the everyone whose income is from investment is stealing from the people who work to produce these returns.
"the everyone whose income is from investment is stealing"
So if millionaires are bad for investing and doing good... does that mean "poor" are bad for not investing? Does that mean that the poor people should suffer when investments go bad? And what about stuff that requires billions - IE: Star Link, Tesla, Spaceships, etc? You think a company shouldn't reward people who risked millions?
Your problem is you don't accept that most people won't take the risks - either because they can't or because they won't. Those that do are what have created the world of miracles we live in. From computer to phones to the site we are talking across right now.
Saying that investers are stealing is a bold faced lie because without those investors there wouldn't be anything to "steal". And if employees had to work at a company that wasn't profitable for decades - IE: Tesla wasn't profitable for 17 years - then a majority of companies wouldn't exist.
outlandish inheritance tax punishes those who work hard and take risks - risks that should be rewarded and not punished by greedy people unwilling or unable to take those risks. "the rich" already pay more than their share and it's simple greed to want more More MORE MOAR! of other peoples money simply because they have the balls to take risks.
Inheritance tax is not about taking it all away. It's about heavily texting everything beyond a reasonable amount. Even if you could at max inherit "just" a million Euro, that be much more than enough to start a comfortable life, while at the same time eliminating a huge factor of the ever widening poverty/wealth gap.
I always found this way of thinking too shortsighted. No matter the millions on your bank account, being rich isn’t fun if the rest of the populace is poor, uneducated and bland, the economy void of investment opportunities, and the environment decaying.
All of those are problems related to lacking education, which is related to poor living conditions in the lower social classes.
By distributing wealth more equally, you improve the world your children are going to live in, and by extension their own lives.
Seriously? It's not billionaires who "earn" money by doing nothing who are greedy, but those who think such greed should not be allowed to perpetuate across generations? That is the position you're trying to defend?
Super weird take. Most money is in capital. So most money needs to be spent/taxed in capital. Rich get richer and poor get poorer. That can't work. It's not sustainable. If wages would rise at the same rate as capital we might not need to have this conversation."successful" is also a pretty dim interpretation. Are people who care for elderly or teach kids not worth anything just because they are not CEOs? They should be seen as "successful" but instead we respect the people who exploit the most and are the most ruthless and psychopathic. It's really sad to see that money is the only metric for "success" some people employ.
