Born on Third Base: The Case for Inheriting Nothing and Building Everything

Inheritance is not about the children.

You ask whose labour is seized by a 100% death tax?  The parents' labour.  That's obvious enough that I feel I must be missing something.  What was your (presumably?) rhetorical question supposed to make me consider?

Inheritance is a way to get people to contribute towards prosperity for the future of the human race...by convincing them to contribute towards the prosperity of Bob, their beloved son.  Maybe you don't need a personal connection to take selfless actions, but that's not universal: I bet that a 100% death tax world would have a lot more golf courses and cruise ships funded by reverse mortgages and premature sales of family businesses.

A low inheritance tax tells people that they can have a direct impact on a cause they care about (usually their children) after their death.  A 100% death tax tells people that they can have as much of an impact as typical government funding on the causes the government spends money on.

I know which one would motivate me to be a better steward of my wealth.

The resistance to such a policy is largely about ideology rather than about feasibility. It is about the quiet but pervasive belief that those born into privilege should remain there.

I don't think this is true at all. There is an ideological argument for inheritance, but it's not the one you're giving.

The ideological argument is that in a system with private property, people should be able to spend the money they earn in the ways they want, and one of the things people most want is to spend money on their children. The important person served by inheritance law is the person who made the money, not their inheritors (who you rightly point out didn't do anything).

In practice, a lot of property is transferred into family trusts, and appointed family members exercise decision making over those assets according to the rules of that trust. A 100% death tax would simply ensure that essentially all property is managed in this manner for the adequately wealthy, and only impact families too disadvantaged to use this sort of structure. If you don't personally own anything of note at the time of your death, your taxes will be minimal.

You would also need a 100% gift tax, essentially prohibiting all gifts between private citizens. You bought your child something, or (worse!) gave them money to buy it themselves? That's clearly an attempt to get around inheritance tax and must be prevented.

There are also huge numbers of private businesses, for which this sort of tax would be nothing but an enormous micromanaging nationalization scheme with predictable disastrous results.

This does not work, at all.

I agree with you that, if we need to tax something to pay for our government services, then inheritance tax is arguably not a terrible choice.

But a lot of your arguments seem a bit problematic to me. First, as a point of basic practicality, why 100%? Couldn't most of your aims be achieved with a lesser percentage? That would also smooth out weird edge cases.

There is something fundamentally compelling about the idea that every generation should start fresh, free from the accumulated advantages or disadvantages of their ancestors.

 

This quote stood out to me as interesting. I know this isn't what you meant, but as a society it would be really weird to collectively decide "don't give the next generation fire, they need to start fresh and rediscover that for themselves. We shouldn't give them the accumulated advantages of their ancestors, send them to the wilderness and let them start fresh!".

 

The world changes when wealth is not locked away in trust funds but directed toward the collective advancement of society. The benefits are not theoretical; research consistently shows that high social mobility correlates with stronger economies, more resilient democracies, and greater national well-being.

Error: causation being inferred from correlation. Totally unwarranted!

Family-run businesses, often cited as collateral damage in such discussions, could be granted transitional arrangements to ensure they remain viable while still upholding the principle that wealth should not be inherited unearned.

If you want to argue that, actually say how the arrangement should look like. 

A tax structure would need to close these gaps, treating all lifetime wealth transfers as taxable events

If you say 100% death tax and want to treat all lifetime wealth transfers as taxable events, do you mean nobody is allowed to give any wealth away? 

No birthday gifts at all? No donations to charity where someone transfers wealth to charity?

This seems... evil or at the very least zero-sum thinking to me.

Would you want to stop the successful from paying for their children's education? Spending their time on raising their children? Do you want to take all children away from their parents to make sure they aren't put on different footing? Perhaps genetically enforce equality?

I would much rather governments try to preserve hereditary positive dynamics,  while getting involved with negative ones. 

We'll have won once all trees are positive and successful, and bad apples do not create generations of bad trees

There is something fundamentally compelling about the idea that every generation should start fresh, free from the accumulated advantages or disadvantages of their ancestors.
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The death tax does not punish success—it prevents success from becoming hereditary. It ensures that the cycle of opportunity begins anew with each generation.

This smells like AI slop.