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 the only way things can be fair is if you steal from others you think have too much to make things 'equal'.
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.
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.
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)
Again: Always time to take money you didn't earn. Greed is an ugly emotion and socialism/marxism/theft is a fail no matter how you try to dress it up.
I'm defending the fact that people always want what others have. Most people don't give a shit about poor people they just hate rich people. Because they "didn't earn it".
My position is real simple: Taxation is theft and greedy people always want to take from successful people.
Hard pill to swallow but the rich already pay their fair share in most circumstances - IE: the vast majority of taxes is paid by the "rich" in the US for example... but it's never enough. There's never enough of other peoples money to spend to help "the poor".
It starts with "greed is wanting that which you didn't earn". No, that is not what greed is by any stretch of imagination.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/greed
"a very strong wish to continuously get more of something, especially food or money"
It is, by definition, the rich who are greedy. Those who want to limit generational wealth are fighting greed
Like Paul birch said [1]:
> Why do people react this way? Why do they hide? Why are they unable to face the truth? Because the truth would be painful. Not only would they be forced to re-evaluate their whole outlook on life, in a costly paradigm shift that any rational person will wish to avoid; *they would also have to accept that their customary behaviour and cherished beliefs have been wrong; not merely mistaken, but ethically and morally inexcusable.* They would have to admit, to themselves even more than to the world, that they have given aid and comfort to thugs and thieves and murderers, that they have aided and abetted banditry and oppression and fraud, that they are themselves thieves and plunderers and oppressors — in short *that they are evil.*
[1]https://mindstalk.net/paulbirch/Emotional%20Capital%20Blocks...
It is infact you, the person you are agreeing with, and Paul Birch who have spent their whole lives supporting theft, grift and coercion.
because they aren't evil. The vast majority of people are good and follow the rules as set forth (unless you follow the rule that all people break the laws so it's not like poor people are more "pure" in any sense".
Capitalists aren't evil because they do stuff that makes money any more than poor people are evil because they aren't smart enough, don't work hard enough, aren't lucky enough to have skill, etc.
Musk and Bezo's aren't "Evil" unless in your world view evil means "successful". And that's a shit world view.
or let me spin it this way...
You're absolutely correct, but for people who have spent their whole lives being victims, being jealous and not being willing to work hard enough doing stuff that's valuable to society, it's difficult for them to see themselves as the cause of their failure.
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.
"But rich people don't get paid for being rich, they get paid to take risks! To invest!"
There are two definitions of investment running around. One definition has a moral component: you sacrifice consumption today in order to build factories or take risks, thereby enabling greater consumption tomorrow, improving the world and taking a cut of the improvement. That's fine. Great, even! There's a second definition that is amoral, though: anything that you put capital into that provides a return is an investment. This second definition is just fine with "create a problem, sell the cure" and indeed encourages a lot of it. If you look at economic sectors, the ones that are doing really well (health care, housing, education) seem to have this as a high level strategy. Underproduce doctors, price goes up. Fuck up the zoning, price goes up. Pump more debt, price goes up. Merge up the competitors, price goes up. This is deeply unfortunate. Capitalism gets most of its legitimacy from the idea of competition as a check on power, but it seems that most of the money is made by figuring out how not to compete. They teach the Prisoner's Dilemma on the very first day of business school with this very lesson in mind. Don't play the game, play the meta-game! Don't build a product, build a moat! This is highly problematic.
When the economy expands by multiples but most people see their pie slice not only failing to keep pace in relative turns but failing to grow in absolute terms, that's a problem, a failed promise.
What's the answer? The right will hop up and down shrieking "Stalin!" "Mao!" any time you talk about taxing assets, but no, 100 million people will not starve to death if capital gains income gets taxed as regular income, or if we meet in the middle with work hours so that people are allowed to raise their own kids again, or any of a dozen other progressive policies. They tried to coup the last Roosevelt and they'll try to coup the next one, but the prospertiy gospel's own failed promises will be its undoing. We've fixed this before and we'll fix it again.