Quote:
Originally Posted by stustaff
If a man built a house and sold if for a $10 million dollar profit or just made $10million in his lifetime, Should that money go to his chindren and their children and their children and perhaps another 3 generations all earning interest from something that their great great great grandfather did 125 years earlier?
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Most civilized countries have estate taxes that kick in above a certain level. There are a number of ways to look at it, but reclaiming that wealth for the "collective" so that other kids can have a chance, instead of making some children rich for no good reason. And the related argumentation, that the wealth built up by the original person was not done in a vacuum, but based on the infrastructure and economy of the country involved, and therefore it should be returned to the community, in part, upon his death. In the same way that copyright involves the return of intellectual property to the public domain after a time, so that people like Walt Disney can create new works mining public domain intellectual property like Snow White and Cinderella.