I find it interesting that (at least in the given extract) Buffett only highlights one of the two sources of unfair advantage (unfair starting conditions, but not unfair monopolies) that help people get exponentially rich with a non-corresponding increase - or even status quo - in the level of effort, quality of work, irreplaceability or risk to quality of life.
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Banded tax - versus flat rate - is not fair. But neither will your fourth million dollars be.
From society's point of view, until we have more rationality and ideality of labour-reward on the income side, I don't think fairness arguments can really be mounted to the abolishment of taxes that make it unfairly expensive to be rich.
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That said, with regards to inheritance tax, I have always really struggled to find any theoretical solution to the inconsistency I perceive in the system - children will always have unequal starts in life related to the efforts and success of their parents; be that in somewhat intangible notions like forming a great network of contacts, or right down to trying extra hard to woo a mother/father that will give the kids a great genotype. Why start - or stop - at money? Has political, social or economic science ever sought to justify that?
Not sure what you're getting at, but going all the way back to Plato's Republic, there have been proposals to engineer society with children. More recently,
Children's Societies were one of the features of kibbutz life that most interested outsiders. In the heyday of Children's Societies, parents would only spend two hours a day, typically in the afternoon, with their children. In Kibbutz Artzi parents were explicitly forbidden to put their children to bed at night. As children got older, parents could go for days on end without seeing their offspring, other than through chance encounters somewhere in the grounds.
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Banded tax - versus flat rate - is not fair. But neither will your fourth million dollars be.
From society's point of view, until we have more rationality and ideality of labour-reward on the income side, I don't think fairness arguments can really be mounted to the abolishment of taxes that make it unfairly expensive to be rich.
--
That said, with regards to inheritance tax, I have always really struggled to find any theoretical solution to the inconsistency I perceive in the system - children will always have unequal starts in life related to the efforts and success of their parents; be that in somewhat intangible notions like forming a great network of contacts, or right down to trying extra hard to woo a mother/father that will give the kids a great genotype. Why start - or stop - at money? Has political, social or economic science ever sought to justify that?