New research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) released on Wednesday shows that intergenerational financial support — flowing from older, wealthy family members to younger ones — is increasingly driving inequality.
Inherited wealthy is antithetical to an egalitarian society. And people whose lives have been influenced or stand to be influenced by inherited wealth are terrified of egalitarianism.
Take a moment to imagine a world where everybody started from the same point and nobody was able to ride the achievements of their parents or grandparents. We could have a true meritocracy, instead of being ruled by rich people’s spoiled kids.
And when you die, your property goes back to the state to be bought by someone else. If you started and built a company, it goes under democratic control of its employees.
Sounds pretty nice.
I’ve been thinking this for a while, it’s difficult to think about transitioning to a system like this from inside a system that we’re in now. We’re all hardwired to take advantage of anything we can get, because basic necessities are held hostage.
To start with on social change like this, I think we’d need to induce a feeling of safety in the general person. Everyone should have a baseline of their food, shelter, basic needs being met. Only after we have a generation freed from that fear of scarcity can we start making societal changes as large as this, or if we’re lucky it’ll occur by itself as a social movement.
Agreed, there’s a great deal of distance between this and that, and realistically it seems unlikely that it would ever be possible. But it sure is nice to imagine, no need or desire to accumulate more than you need in one lifetime, and nobody starting 10 steps ahead or behind.
As long at it only applies to the truly wealthy. Most of us strive to give our kids a little bit better than our parents could manage. A modest family home, small business, or modest investments shouldn’t be taxed. Taking away a house someone worked 40 years to pay off from family who can no longer afford payments on a house while massive profits are being extracted from this country by foreign corporations would be a massive regression.
What generally happens is the rich employ their lawyers and tax accountants to avoid paying a cent and the people who deserve a break are kept down.
It’s not taboo. Rich people own the vast majority of news outlets, and the topic is taboo to THEM
…and the people who are mindlessly influenced by the media outlets.
I think ‘mindlessly’ is a bit harsh. I mean, people have to get their information from somewhere. Each person must learn how all the different sorts of taxes work, and why they are like that, and what consequences and effects there are for different types of taxation; and what the money is used for, and how much money is needed, etc. It’s very complex, with many interdependencies with different parts of the wider economic system. There’s some intuitive stuff, but there is also some less obvious stuff learnt from historical experience.
A person could become a bit of an expert by studying taxes and economics and related fields and university or some other way - but very few people will actually do that, for all sorts of good reasons. So really almost all of us must instead rely on information that we source from other people. But who? Should we trust the leaders of our country, the politicians? Should we trust some random youTuber who says they’ve “done their research” and worked out the truth? Should we trust the ‘expert options’ being cited by a media outlet that has being publishing news for decades?
It’s not easy. Really it isn’t. Well established media outlets kind of do deserve more trust in these issues than most sources, despite some very obvious problems with that. And although its fair to say that we should use a variety of sources and cross-check / ananlyse them, that’s easier said that done too. There are many different media outlets. What may look like different sources are sometimes controlled by the same set of people in non-obvious ways. And as for newer / non-mainstream sources, there are thousands of them; many set up for doing their best effort to tell the truth, but many others set up to do their best effort to distort and manipulate the truth. It’s not always easy to tell the difference without becoming an expert oneself.
My point is that although it is possible to push through misinformation and manipulation to get a real sense how things are, that is by no means easy. And it often takes special effort for almost every different topic that we are making decisions about; taxes, foreign policies, tobacco laws, housing policies, etc. All these things are potentially affected by different conflicts of interest or biases, and so it just really is not easy to avoid being “mindlessly influenced by the media outlets”. Probably all of us have badly twisted views about at least some topics, even if we do our best to get it right.
You are correct, I was a bit harsh. There are quite a few people in my life who have been fully indoctrinated by know unreliable sources of news, who are actively hostile reliable sources of news.
Facts are facts, but truth is subjective. They prefer news agencies who adhere to the truth that they have been told to believe, despite their truths contradicting facts.
Feels quite the opposite from my perspective. The amount the tax office has taken over the 2 years to clear my parent’s estate is staggering. The legal fees felt proportionate, tax hell no! Paying for dying is idiotic.
