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I don’t like that the state can take part of the wealth you’ve worked for after you die. But obviously laws to steal money from everybody else are popular.
by jikbd 5y ago
I don’t like that the state can take part of the wealth you’ve worked for after you die. But obviously laws to steal money from everybody else are popular.
- pjc50 5y agoWhat are you proposing to do with it when you're dead?
- jikbd 5y agoPass it on to whomever I choose. Since it is, you know, my money.
- pavlov 5y agoSo why shouldn't the person receiving the money pay tax on it? After all it's new income for them.
- jikbd 5y agoBecause that money has already paid tax before.
- wpietri 5y agoMoney doesn't pay tax. People do. And if it did, then taxes would have been done a long time ago, because money in its endless circulation pays taxes all the time.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Money doesn't pay tax. People do. To emphasise this point, when an employer pays an employee wages, they pay it with a dollar that someone else earned (and paid tax on) and paid to them (and likely paid sales tax on). Money isn’t taxed, and neither are people; transactions are. An estate transfer is a transaction.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoEhhh, please tell me about the transaction that's involved in the annual property taxes I pay?
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> please tell me about the transaction that's involved in the annual property taxes I pay? A house isn’t a person. Saying transactions, not people, are taxed doesn’t mean that only transactions are taxed.
- scatters 5y agoAside from the services provided by your municipality (which may or may not be paid for out of property taxes) there's the aspect of imputed rent; the notional benefit that you as a tenant receive from yourself as a landlord. Some places tax that explicitly, as it happens.
- foo_barrio 5y agoMoney is already taxed multiple times though (in my part of the world NE US). If I buy a car with income received via dividends from Apple stock: * state sales sax on car * future city property tax on car * fed dividend tax on money used to pay for car * apple already paid state and fed corp income tax on money used to pay dividend * some person already paid income tax on money used to buy iphones/macs/chargers etc. Is your position that the estate tax in particular is egregious or that all taxes are egregious? If you only want money to be taxed once then you'd have to redo all the taxes no?
- aww_dang 5y agoObserving the status quo isn't the same as rationalizing it. Many things exist in the world today which are unjust. Some are even common. If it is possible for taxation to be egregious, then at some point there must be a boundary which is crossed. How can we define what is a just amount of property to confiscate with our subjective judgment? It is a moral issue in principle. In practice it amounts to whatever politicians can get away with. Ideologues present wealth as evidence of greed. Envy is celebrated. The person with a bigger slice of pie is blamed for other's perceptions of insufficient portions, as if markets represent a zero-sum game. Cries of, "You didn't build that" are overly simplistic and misleading. If they were valid, collectives and central planners could produce surpluses without need for individualized incentives. Yet history tells us a different story. That slice of pie which so many here seem unhappy with is much bigger than what was eaten in years before. This is the result of individual profit incentives, competition and innovation, not taxation or central planning. If it is to be a moral issue, perhaps we should start from the point of not coercing others or violating their property rights?
- foo_barrio 5y ago"You didn't build that" is as naive as "all taxes are theft" no? As important property rights are so is working together. No one human kills a lion or works a farm no?
- dennis_jeeves 5y agodemocracy=2 wolves + a sheep voting on what's for dinner
- wpietri 5y agoYour money? It says right on them that they're United States Dollars. Jokes aside, the rules of property are set up by society to encourage certain jointly beneficial outcomes. Money itself is an inherently social construct. (Imagine how far you'd get creating your own private currency that only you used.) And we are all temporary beings, here a little while and gone. Yes, some of the rules designate some of the property as yours to dispose of for the duration. Which is great! But make no mistake that these rules are contingent. If tomorrow I hacked all the banks and land registries so I owned everything, people wouldn't say, "Well, I guess that's how it is now." The same is true if I did it technically within the rules. Everybody would make new rules. And they'd be right to. In the phrasing of James Carse, the current rules are the finite game, but like all finite games, the rules are generated by what he calls the infinite game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
- user743 5y agoI think if modern life was a boardgame, no one would want to play because the system is too rigged. To me it's silly to see how much unused land there is in the USA but people aren't allowed to use it because a few people showed up 150 years ago and claimed it for themselves. And when they did they stole it from other people. Now people are just supposed to respect that forever?
- mbrumlow 5y ago> Imagine how far you'd get creating your own private currency that only you used. Coinbase and other places seem to facilitate private currencies.
- wpietri 5y agoIf more than one person is using a currency, it's definitionally a social activity then, and pretty clearly not what I mean by "your own private currency that only you used".
- pjc50 5y agoOnce you've passed it on to them, it's their money, no longer your money. The rule against perpetuities only prevents you from constructing a zombie legal entity which outlives you permanently. Some places have a fixed, high time limit; many merely have the non-onerous rule that you can only leave it to people who were alive at the time of your death.
- wpietri 5y agoSure. I don't like people using the infrastructures of the state and community plus community labor while privatizing their gains and socializing the costs. Maybe we can compromise on you taking yourself to some remote spot cut off from a society and generating your wealth there? Then we can all be sure your gains are truly yours, and so nobody will mind you hoarding them.
- jikbd 5y agoA rich person already pays taxes. Also, I’m not sure about what you mean with “community labour” - a rich person also pays his employees. This is nothing but double taxation. Ie highway robbery.
- wpietri 5y agoA rich person already pays taxes at a rate that is currently heavily influenced by rich people, so I'm not seeing that as much of a justification. But yes, when a rich person gives their money to another person, that other person now has to pay tax. An estate, gift, or income tax. Many rich people pay their employees, some don't; wage theft is very popular, as are other forms of labor exploitation. But an educated, healthy, available labor force is a very expensive asset to create. We all invest in creating that through things like paying for schools, health care, and raising children. One of the ways we pay for creating that asset is taxes. Rich people, as the ones most benefiting from society, and also as the ones with the most spare money, should pay their fair share for that.
- nosianu 5y agoWhen a human is able to amass billions today it is not because of their own abilities. With their own abilities alone they could at most build a mildly nice hut from mud and forest wood. The reason they can build modern stuff is due to the work of billions of people networked in space and time (knowledge, processes & culture, tools, infrastructure) to which the "self-made rich person" has the extreme fortune to be able to build on (even today most people are born in places too far away to benefit equally from that network and are only able to access a tiny part of it, so no matter their own contribution they are lacking the base). Tell me, why would a person whose accomplishments are ~99.99999% based on the work and accomplishments of others be allowed to monopolize it as if they were truly responsible for everything? As far as I'm concerned the government should truly not be allowed to tax your entirely self-made mud hut disconnected from infrastructure in the middle of nowhere. For all else, you benefit from gigantic network effects (in space: all other people alive making things, in time: everything we got from previous generations) and should pay your dues. Given that, even a very high tax rate especially after death is extremely generous. The descendants had even less to do with anything the person that sat in a perfect place in the human network accomplished by making use of their advantageous position (to be exact, zero). At most, their contribution is to be able to use said network very well - although it also happens a lot that they did so by preventing others from using it.
- aww_dang 5y ago>Tell me, why would a person whose accomplishments are ~99.99999% based on the work and accomplishments of others be allowed to monopolize it as if they were truly responsible for everything? Wealth is the incentive for the wealth creation you're observing here.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoWealth is an incentive for wealth aggregation those aren't the same thing. More wealth would be created if companies payed their workers more (since poor people actually need the money to pay for things)
- 5y ago