euthanasy when one stops on being selfsufficient is the last gift to your own family, insteads of sqaundering hundreds of grands to keep the heartbeat going.
Hey we just want you to pay your fair share! On top of the sales tax people paid when they bought your employer’s products, the payroll tax your employer paid, the income tax you paid, the sales tax you pay when you buy anything, and the inheritance tax you’ll pay when you die.
In fairness, most proponents of inheritance tax see it as solving the problem of wealth pooling in certain places and not continuing to be redistributed. You cannot claim to have a fair, meritocratic, and egalitarian society if there is a certain segment of the population who can automatically afford to outbid the rest of the population on anything that matters. If there's a limited supply of teachers and you can afford all the good ones, then we aren't going into the race with equal opportunities.
I'm also sceptical of the rhetoric about wealth disappearing within a couple of generations, because that has historically not been the case in Europe at all. Germany hasn't had kings for a long while, but generational wealth lasts, and you can still see the effects of it in various descendants to this day. In the UK, generational wealth has a huge impact on outcomes, with a system of highly expensive private schools that institutionalise the privileges of wealth.
> If there's a limited supply of teachers and you can afford all the good ones, then we aren't going into the race with equal opportunities.
There is probably a very small supply of that. But I see little evidence that the rich monopolize them. They can't, because it's impossible to evaluate good teachers (and this probably holds true no matter what metric you hold to be the one that measures "good").
Why would a "good" teacher be noticed by anyone? Is it when they win the popularity contest, and the local paper does some article about how they're some small town treasure? I don't think those are good teachers, they're just "liked" teachers. And besides, even if "liked" means "good" to you, the rich aren't swooping in and hiring them as private tutors or even putting them into private academies. The public, misfortunate or fortunate, gets to keep those.
Are they running some NSA-like intelligence gathering operation, seeing that one teacher that has some sort of impossible classroom grade average in urban hellhole schools? Because I am more than a little certain, even great teachers (again, by whatever metric you want) just aren't doing that. Those children fail not because they have bad teachers, or at least not only for that reason.
> I'm also sceptical of the rhetoric about wealth disappearing within a couple of generations, because that has historically not been the case in Europe at all. Germany hasn't had kings for a long while, but generational wealth lasts, and you can still see the effects of it in various descendants to this day. In the UK, generational wealth has a huge impact on outcomes, with a system of highly expensive private schools that institutionalise the privileges of wealth.
Sure, that's probably true. But who the hell looks at that and concludes "I've seen families that have remained wealthy for centuries and what I want for my own descendants is to become peasants and wage slaves instead"?
Do you hate your own children, your own nieces and nephews so much? Do you just love everyone else's children more than them, somehow?
And it's not like you can even succeed. They've had the loopholes planned for 50 years now. At some point you might manage to rabblerouse enough that you get the no-inheritance laws passed, but for people who can buy a passport in another country they'll just take it with them. One way or another. It's almost as if it's not about the billionaires at all, not the 1%, but about the people who are sitting from 80-82%. They managed to squirrel a million or two away, not even in cash, just a family farm or a home, or some other little piece of real estate. Fuck those guys, the ones not quite rich enough to abscond to some paradise island.
So that's my plan. Get rich enough, myself or my kids or grandkids, to get the hell away from the envious before they manage to hijack the government and use it to steal from me.
One can review teachers much like one reviews any other profession. You review their CV, invite them to an interview, see if they know their stuff, put them in front of classrooms, check their references, etc.
We don't need the NSA to tell us who the best and worst developers are, right?
> Sure, that's probably true. But who the hell looks at that and concludes "I've seen families that have remained wealthy for centuries and what I want for my own descendants is to become peasants and wage slaves instead"?
That's the thing, neither of those options are acceptable to me. As Raymond Hettinger says (admittedly about easier problems to solve), there must be a better way. I think it's possible to have a society with neither oligopolistic structures benefiting only the rich, nor wage slavery for anyone who doesn't make it. And moreover, I think the best possible result for my children is not that I or they manage to ascend to the upper echelons, but rather that they live in a society where those upper echelons aren't present in the first place.
> One can review teachers much like one reviews any other profession.
I'm not sure how you think this is relevant. One can, but they aren't reviewed in any meaningful way. And as anyone who has read through a few Amazon reviews would tell you, relying on "reviews" for anything important is just asking for grief.
> We don't need the NSA to tell us who the best and worst developers are, right?
Most companies would love nothing more than to be able to tell which is which. And we get fizzbuzz and other interview fads every 18 months. It's not even clear that bad developers are bad other than in specific environments... the guy who was shit at the shit job might turn around and be pretty good at another non-shit job, and those who are "good" often have other issues.
But even for developers, there are at least some (bad?) metrics to measure by other than "some percentage of these brats didn't flunk the standardized testing". If my code failed on 40% of computers for no other reason than that the owners of those computers lived in one zip code and not another zip code, I'd probably be a worst developer too.
> That's the thing, neither of those options are acceptable to me.
Which makes it great for me that what you find acceptable has nothing to do with how the world actually works.
> As Raymond Hettinger says (admittedly about easier problems to solve), there must be a better way.
You're a monkey with a Dunbar number of about 250. Maybe on up to 300. There is no utopia for you, not even a "better but not utopia" once you're up past that number locally. So unless the population falls under 3 or 4 million, you're just fucked. You'd have to become a new species, something wildly different than the primate you are.
That's not impossible I don't think. But most of us don't want to become the termite people with you. Not that that's stopping you... the number of sterile worker drones that read my comment here is ironically very high, I think, for me to be writing this. Hell, maybe you could speciate in a few hundred years if there were no other obstacles.
> but rather that they live in a society where those upper echelons aren't present in the first place.
That's easy. The Soviets figured it out decades ago. Have you tried Stalinism?
