Re:Don't Lower Corporate Taxes, Abolish Them
by usrusr on Sunday November 27, 2016 @05:06AM
(#13048528)
I value the spirit of passing something on, but I despise the inequality that emerges from repeated iteration.
The value lies in long term thinking, sustainability. A farmer can either maintain the soil, carefully rotating crops so that it will be able to feed future generations as good or better than his predecessors, or he can go for the agricultural equivalent of strip mining and move on to the next plot when the previous one is depleted.
But when you replace the soil with fungible assets, all that long term thinking benefit goes out the window. Sticking to the farming example, repeated slash and burn farming will only encourage more of the same, as long as there is something left to burn. Larger operators will grow faster than smaller ones, and after a few generations, when there is nothing left to burn, the descendants of those who burnt the most will employ the losers to tend the desert.
The value lies in long term thinking, sustainability. A farmer can either maintain the soil, carefully rotating crops so that it will be able to feed future generations as good or better than his predecessors, or he can go for the agricultural equivalent of strip mining and move on to the next plot when the previous one is depleted.
But when you replace the soil with fungible assets, all that long term thinking benefit goes out the window. Sticking to the farming example, repeated slash and burn farming will only encourage more of the same, as long as there is something left to burn. Larger operators will grow faster than smaller ones, and after a few generations, when there is nothing left to burn, the descendants of those who burnt the most will employ the losers to tend the desert.