> set inheritance tax and gift tax to 100%

Would anyone leave inheritances or give gifts after that? People would just spend everything they have, targeting a $0 or negative net worth at death.

That’s kind of the point.

The point is that people spend what they have? What would that do?

Well, it'd be great for the economy.

Such a society would not fly. Imagine being a parent and unable to be able to give your kids an advantage. It would devolve into pure chaos.

You just described the situation of millions of parents in the US today.

Why does your kid need a financial advantage? If society provided an equal footing for every child, the advantages you could provide to them would be love, advice inspiration, and bettering society so that there was more for them.

You say “that’ll never fly”, but I say if we’re going to imagine a better world why not imagine it radically better not just incrementally better.

It's not radically better. Giving people who at the age of 50 have enough money to live on no way of passing anything on will disincentivise a giant number of things you take for granted.

Like what? I'm interested in disincentivizing the accumulation of more wealth than you can spend in a lifetime, and the continued sequestering of that wealth into family lines. We abolished the monarchy for a reason - we don't want to be ruled by people who were born into their position.

There is a big difference between wealth and monarchy. You aren't ruled by people with money, although one of them might offer you a job.

They literally shape the world around us. Money = speech, so they speak louder than us. It may not be quite so restrictive as a lord-surf relationship, but “giving you a job” is a power dynamic that edges towards feudal when the choice is homelessness and starvation or work.

It is a sad world in which the only thing one could give his children is money/property.

This is the situation for a huge - possibly majority - of parents.

an unjust world where some nosy stranger decides "intergenerational wealth is bad" and "everyone is fed, housed and educated" takes precedence over you working towards your children or your children's children's future because they feel justified in using political oppression to take what you've earned for your family.

Not sure what kind of dystopia you're setting up where politicians will always use the greater good of everyone else to justify any actions against individuals.

You can't just pass a law against inter-generational wealth. It's too easy to work around, too many ways of passing money without directly inheriting it. The only way it could possibly work is if had cultural buy in. If everybody thought it was a good idea and believed in it, at that point the laws just codify and re-enforce the existing beliefs.

So I'm not setting up a dystopia where politicians swoop in and rob the elderly. I'm suggesting what if we radically restructured our society so we ACTUALLY gave everyone an equal opportunity, instead of allowing inequality to accumulate generationaly in the ways it does.

>The only way it could possibly work is if had cultural buy in.

disagree. there are lots of unpopular laws that get passed as part of other bills, under the urging of activists or lobbyists against popular opinion, etc.

>I'm suggesting what if we radically restructured our society so we ACTUALLY gave everyone an equal opportunity, instead of allowing inequality to accumulate generationaly in the ways it does.

The details matter. Big sweeping statements like the above don't mean anything until you get to details - they sound like moral soundbites but they ignore the details of the actions required to get to that point. That way you never have to deal with negatives arising from your ideas, because you never discuss the details enough to get to the negatives, just the platitudes.

> disagree. there are lots of unpopular laws that get passed as part of other bills, under the urging of activists or lobbyists against popular opinion, etc.

Not saying it couldn't be made a law without cultural buy-in, I'm saying the law wouldn't be effective. There are too many workaround. You can give your child your stuff while you're still alive. You can put it all into a trust. You can create a scholarship where the criteria is being this one person. You can put it all in gold bars and bury it in the backyard. Etc. etc. etc. but if there is a cultural consensus that doing that is WRONG, people will by-and-large not do it.

> The details matter.

Indeed they do. But if we can't agree that the goal would be a good one, there's no point in getting into the details. It seems that there are a lot of people on here who don't think we should be seeking to create a society that actually provides equal opportunities - in that context, debating how to achieve that goal is pretty useless. If we all agree that it would be good, then we can discuss specific plans and proposals to get closer to that goal.

>Not saying it couldn't be made a law without cultural buy-in, I'm saying the law wouldn't be effective.

The bureaucracy would expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, and enforcement mechanisms would be created like every other tax rule, enforced at the end of a gun like every other tax rule.

>But if we can't agree that the goal would be a good one, there's no point in getting into the details.

On the opposite - without the details the goal is just a meaningless sound bite, used as a weapon to justify things many won't agree to by saying 'but didn't you agree goal x is important?'.

The answer is 'depends on the cost'. If the cost is empowering equality of outcome proponents, or creating communist style political commissar enforcement mechanisms, then no, not worth it.

That's why I say details of plan first, not last. it's easy to say "what if we had equal opportunity" and get head nods but ultimately meaningless. The details are what matter, and if you can't present what you think is a good plan, you don't have one - you just have a platitude to justify wide future actions that I probably wouldn't support.

> enforced at the end of a gun like every other tax rule.

Ahh, like every other tax rule - so not really at all for rich people and quite heavily for poor and middle class people? Sounds about right.

> That's why I say details of plan first, not last

I hope that's not the approach you take with everything in life. "Do you want to go out to eat?" ... "What restaurant? I'll only say if I want to go when the venue has been selected." That's not measured caution, or the ideal - a collaborative approach to solving problems - that response is a trap where every suggestion is met with disdain. Saying "Yes I would like to go out to eat, what restaurant did you have in mind?" doesn't mean you have to go if the selected venue turns out to be chuck-e-cheese.

>I hope that's not the approach you take with everything in life.

It is from blatant political rejiggering that use these platitudes to gain artificial buy in from the uninformed.

I mean, if you just ask hitler his goal was to restore germany to greatness. Why can't you just agree with his goal before you know his plan? I hoped that's not the approach you take to political platitudes.

If you have reason to suspect someone is using these platitudes to gain buy in their plans would never gain, its important to ask for the details. If they don't have details, they're just a useful idiot. If they do have details, they're the thing that separate good and bad.

So lets not pretend "lets agree to my incredibly vague goal without any mention of how we get there" is a reasonable thing to try and thrust on strangers EXCEPT for the express purpose of manipulation and echo chamber buy ins.