This is a fairly big one for me that has been on my mind recently. Generational wealth needs to be severely capped. I’m not sure where I would cap it. But a total cash value of $5 million in total assets (including up to 1 family home) indexed to inflation in some way seems like a reasonable starting point. It’s still enough to give your child(ren) a serious leg up in life, but not enough to create massively unrecoverable imbalance. How to dispose of the rest of your personal assets then becomes the issue. Government confiscation like you suggested is one route, another might be forced disbursement to registered charities or creating charitable foundations. I’m sure there are still ways the system could still be corrupted, but it would be a start.
Of course that’s easy for me to say because I’m childless. People seem to have this weird affection for their offspring that often compels them to want to do as much as possible for them . It’s an awful hard thing to socially engineer. You’d have to do it simultaneously with no loopholes to ever make it viable and some people are still going to try and do everything in their power to thwart the idea. Stupid biology.
One way to do this (and possibly make it more politically palatable) would be to exclude more wealth from estate taxes for each child of the deceased - say $1million per kid. The pronatalists will love it!
Yeah, I was trying to thread the needle between both - allowing for unlimited untaxed donations to “sufficiently worthy” (and yeah, that’s going to need careful oversight) causes such as education, or other public benefits, with the state taking anything not otherwise entailed. I don’t care if you want your name to live forever by plastering it over a new library, or several scholarships baring your name, as long as it contributes positively to society. If you have Bezos money, and want to spend a huge chunk of time planning on how it will be doled out, fine. But the key point is to re-distribute the wealth back to society rather than it be held and hoarded.
A nice side effect is that it’ll return lots of specific assets such as art, historical objects and the like which is often removed from the public view by private collectors - sure, it’ll be auctioned off again, but perhaps it’ll be bequeathed (as above) or at least available once a generation.
No, it’s not a perfect answer, but it makes for a balance between the pedestal of benefitting from your personal efforts, and the good of society. Since I don’t have magic powers, just incredible political powers for my “term”.
That doesn’t go far enough. We need Fully-Automated Luxury Space Gay Communism (F-ALSGC).
Unfortunately we would need at least a couple of hundred years of continued, uninterrupted technological development to reach such a post-scarcity state.
We would also need the good luck required to avoid (the much more likely) a range of techno-surveillance dystopias, various AI-related nightmares, and the ecological collapse of our global environment, so the chances of attaining F-ALSGC are pretty slim.
In Walden II B.F. Skinner suggests a utopian commune, one of the features of which is communal parenting. Adults to teens bang and produce children at any age, but all kids are taken care of in a group organized and run day care facility most of the time. Parents can come and go as they please.
I am not suggesting we go that far, but any happy world includes kids around and those willing to help and able to do so rather than a burden shouldered for only a few.
It is that way even know we just don’t see it. Kids brought up in paid for child care become voters that don’t care about any state funding for child care.
This is a good idea, but then you have issues of child abuse. How do you vet the people? But I’m sure people would figure that out with surveillance, vetting, background checks, etc.
The reason I mention that is that its my understand that child molestation has luckily dropped by something like 70% in the US since the late 80s, and a big part of that is that parents do not leave their kids unattended with strangers nearly as often anymore.
But making sure a child feels loved, safe, protected and validated during the first 18 years of life (especially the first 6, when brain development rapidly happens) is one of the most important things you can do to ensure they become a good person as an adult.
But I think having strongly funded public sector services that allow socialization and reduce stress for the public would be good. Publicly funded childcare, publicly funded 3rd spaces, more work flexibility, publicly funded mentoring opportunities, etc
The kibbutzim tried communal parenting for decades, before deciding that, on balance, it was a bad idea. By 2000 or so, the last of them had returned to children living with their parents. The psychological impacts of the grand experiment have been studied exhaustively, but in brief, they found that on average, communal parenting creates independent, self-reliant, and emotionally damaged adults.
From what I’ve read (admittedly brief) it looked like a poorly run day care. Yeah, those aren’t good. Seems like this could be achieved despite one group failing one time.
I’ll tack on an amendment…wealth is often leveraged or sheltered with debt to avoid taxes. Any asset in simple possession or control, regardless if it is owned or covered by debt, is taxed. Basically multiply everything on your debt sheet by -1 and turn it positive, then tax it. Use appropriate logarithmic curve to remove burden from small wealth/debtors so that grandma’s cottage mortgage is exempt, but the Deutchebank-loan golf club and yacht are taxed to the gills.
Most of the ideas here are more or less different versions of “a more utopian society would follow my ideology”. The reality is that a utopian society is impossible because a lot of people cannot stand the idea of other people following a different ideology, regardless what it is.
I like the idea but you would probably end up with “the company” just being a c suite, then middle management “outsourced” to another separate company and then peons yet more contractors. So you would have to include some additional legislation around when a contractor can be considered part of the company effectively. I think some places have laws similar to this already, but I suspect the incentive your proposal creates would lead to much more creative and complicated games being played by accountants and lawyers.
. It’s an awful hard thing to socially engineer. You’d have to do it simultaneously with no loopholes to ever make it viable and some people are still going to try and do everything in their power to thwart the idea. Stupid biology.