Lucky for me my parents were both “I didn’t save anything for retirement, my kids will take care of me when I’m older”, so I don’t have to suffer through this.
Lucky for me my parents were both “I didn’t save anything for retirement, my kids will take care of me when I’m older”, so I don’t have to suffer through this.
Lewis Carroll has an interesting piece about that. Brings up the point that if someone works hard to benefit the community, and their wealth represents the response of the community to repay that person’s work, perhaps it’s not unreasonable that that person’s request is, “repay it to my children,” i.e. inheritance.
I still don’t get it. So, he benefits from society, then the ethical thing to do is to set up his own family not the society he benefits from?
To a wife of that time, I understand - that is someone who did unpaid labor for decades so that he could have a career. So that money, yes she helped earn it.
I dunno, something about the whole system offends me. Taking more than you need, then directing the excess to your own kids. If literally every family could do it, sure. But how it works now just attenuates inequality.
He gives benefit to society. That’s how he gets rich: by giving a benefit to society, and his riches represent the unpaid recompense from society back to him.
If he were living, he could, for instance, buy a restaurant meal with that money. In that way, society would pay him back by cooking him a meal at the restaurant.
Instead he leaves the money to his children, and they - for instance - buy a car. Then, society pays back the man who benefited them by providing a car to his child.
What a benevolent view of rich people. Not sure I share it. Some subset of them probably fit this mold but plenty got rich wrecking the environment, deferring and externalizing costs that ought to have been borne by the business. Not leaving a better world for others to enjoy. So they extracted wealth from society and instead of that $ going towards mitigation of those damages they pass it to their kids and leave the cleanup for the rest of us.
Where possible, its nice to leave something. It’s not nice to expect or demand it.