Tim Worstall quotes a particularly venomous op-ed piece from The Guardian, and then follows with a quotable summation:
Why do we permit this? The transfer of wealth between generations is an injustice: it is a reward for no work … Professor Thomas Piketty, in his new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, makes the argument that … inheritance is once again becoming the key route to wealth … Pleasant news for our neo-Victorian government; less pleasant for the rest of us, and a disaster for anyone who cares about inequality.
It is difficult to justify inherited wealth from anything other than a class-partisan position ...
Here’s Tim:
Inherited wealth brings freedom to a life. Which is why we should be working towards everyone being able to inherit it, not none. For the desirable outcome is where all have that freedom to do as they wish, not none.
Yep. If you actually poll people about whether they want an inheritance tax applied to their wealth, they respond resoundingly against that … even if they don’t have much wealth. Everyone wants to have the chance to make a bequest.
But, of course, perhaps this whole focus on wealth and inheritance is really about putting other people’s money into bags that are easy to carry off.
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