- Warren Buffett

I think progressive wealth transfer taxes are a perfectly good middle ground.

I fundamentally, emphatically disagree with this. I think it's a weird rewriting of history to think that "Civilization was built by trying to stop wealth transfers within powerful families".

Do I think a lot of wealth is trapped within a few families, and that might be a problem? Sure. Do I think that the ability to destroy generational wealth transfers is what made Civilization? No, and I think it's absolutely crazy to think so. It ignores every great family in history that did everything from win wars to build railroads.

Civilization experiments with policy. At the extreme, there is a push towards consolidation and monopolies and this is counterbalanced by the rule of a unhappy mob. This causes policy to shift over time.

Wealth transfer is income, so progressive income tax without exempting wealth transfer from income tax would seem the most direct solution.

We are past that now. Now we have advisors, funds, elite accountants, and all kinds of dead easy ways to invest and keep huge wealth long term, for even the most inane person. Plus those people are not accountable to anyone. It's not like a hated heir of a royal who has to tread lightly anymore, lest the senate or the people take them down...

In fact, inane people can even make a great fortune from scratch in this era, what with the various famous-for-being-famous celebrities...

1. Advisors and accountants do not own the wealth - you set the goals. If you want to spend it or mismanage it, they are not going to stop you.

2. The wealthier you are, the more difficult it is to maintain the real value of your wealth, in general.

3. If you have 3 children, they have 3 children and so on, and you split your wealth equally among your children, even a billion turns into only 5 million within 5 generations - and that is if they manage to maintain its real value over time.

And if they do manage it cleverly and get to keep the real value of the wealth? Great! Society is better off, because that means they allocated capital productively within our society, making the economy more efficient.

E.g. maintaining the "real value" is not as much of problem for people having tens of billions (as we increasingly see today). Even if the value drops, they're still multi-billionaires. And diversification strategies today span the globe.

And the "3 children inheritance diffusion" problem is easy to solve: rich people have less kids today than historically.

There's also that:

https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...

2. If, on the other hand, there is some survivorship bias going on there and wealth rotates a lot, and some members of wealthy families keep their wealth, that is not as good an outcome but it is still not so bad, as it suggests that as a family's culture degrades their wealth will likely degrade as well.

The opposite. Civilization invented laws so people could pass their wealth and power to their children, to the point that the absolute head of the state was determined by birth and not by skills.

In precivilized tribal cultures there was inheritance of weapons, tools, tents etc. to childrens and of course it played a role beeing born the chieftains son, but no ruler was born that way. They had to directly earn the respect of the tribe, by proving they are good leaders, before they were accepted. Direct democracy, long before the greek "invented" the concept.

I find it strikingly hard to believe that democracy, which is what I assume you’re referring to, is the actual imperative that caused this. If we had managed to avoid WWI it’s really difficult to imagine that we’d still be using a horse drawn buggy and a typewriter.

Most European countries have steep inheritance taxes to prevent going back to oligarchy.

Which has the problem of course, that the really rich have ways of not beeing affected by those laws too much. Which is not too hard, when the tax-laws are ridiciously complicated with many exceptions for good connected lawyers and many countries on this planet who welcome any people and money as long as they get a small share.

The notion of the “idle rich” spoiled offspring exists for a reason. Nothing kills ambition more than unearned wealth. Obviously there are many counter examples with many wealthy heirs contributing significantly to society. But I would argue that they would behave the same if they inherited less.

As Aristotle roughly said, the mean between extremes is often the right answer. You could completely eliminate any transfer of wealth without social collapse; just like you could have essentially unlimited transfer of wealth with out social collapse: you would just end up with an aristocratic system. The question is what do you want to create.

People might be happy to overlook this when things are going well for them personally, or when they feel hopeful about the future. When that is no longer the case for a majority, though, the status quo could be just as 'anti-civilization' as extreme redistribution.

As if family is not about loving and preparing your kids for life (and being good citizens etc), but padding their bank accounts so they don't have to work...

Personally, I would sooner accept 90% tax to the rich&living, than 100% tax upon death.

Both are theoretical of course - there is no way to enforce them really without hurting overall society. There is also no need I think. A better solution is to make sure that wealth doesn't give too much unfair privilege, and that basic living conditions are guaranteed to everyone - we are getting closer to this every decade.

You want a situation where wealthy people build a lot more wealth than they consume. The last thing you want is for them to consume their wealth, making themselves better off but the society overall much, much poorer.

Or, maybe... if there were less of an advantage to accumulating wealth, we wouldn't destroy ourselves and the environment quite so madly while doing so. Great fortunes would not be generated, because what would the point be?

ISTM that a rich person who doesn't want her estate to be confiscated upon her death could just divide it among many heirs? If the progressive tax is not levied on the heir rather than the estate, then maybe it should be. Intentional division would destroy dynastic family wealth without wasting it on the frivolous spending of the state.

2. If the world is poorer, it will be able to afford to protect the environment less, not more. The wealthier a nation, or a neighbourhood is, the more it cares about protecting its local environment. For example, as China gets wealthier, it cares more about having cleaner air.

3. Wealth concentration in the right hands is not necessarily a bad thing. Increasing taxation is just concentrating more wealth in the hands of parliaments/governments, which they are unlikely to spend too effectively given that they are spending someone else's money, but yet which still results in some great outcomes (scientific advancements, until recently space flight etc.). Wealth concentration means that great leaps forward can happen in areas that at first are going to be very expensive (medical/longevity research, grand projects like SpaceX, even originally mobile phones etc.)

If you want to tax anything, it is probably better to tax (frivolous) consumption, i.e. wealth destruction, instead of wealth creation.

Sure, I agree, but we're talking about estate tax ITT.

It's nice to imagine that switching from income taxes to VAT (with appropriate progressive adjustments for the poor) would allow the merely hardworking rather than just the lucky and unscrupulous to accumulate wealth, but it's not clear that would be the case.

No, it would encourage people to conceal wealth transfers as consumptive spending. (Just like existing dedicated wealth transfer taxes—gift and estate taxes—do, but more strongly, and we've seen what people dedicated to transferring wealth, like Fred Trump, already do.)