Re: Alice's inheritnace tax proposals (a problem)

[Robert Charleston <rc3673@student.open.ac.uk>]

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Hi Alice,

If I were defending a position paper on inheritance tax (see 'netiquette' 
spiel) I'd want to point out that:

1. This isn't about dooming society to failure. Few single policy
   decisions are. It's not that society is doomed to failure if
   inheritance tax prevents hereditary accumulation of wealth, it's that
   if it does prevent this it loses a resource that can be difficult to
   replace.

2. Very few rich kids have ever bought an art gallery. But the central
   cladding to the British Museum Reading Room lists the private, wealthy
   donors who paid for it, the Ashmolean and Bodleian in Oxford, the
   Carnegie Hall, the Tates Modern and Britain and so on all bear the
   names of the private benefactors who paid for them.

3. Yes people can earn a lot in one lifetime. Branson is a bad example,
   because he is only worth a fraction of the amount people usually think
   he is. Virgin only continues trading through extensive cross-subsidy
   and tax offshoring. He's not rich in the way that the remaining landed
   families are, and even they are not anywhere near as rich as they used
   to be. I can look up some comparative statistics if you'd like, but
   before the legal reforms, we were talking much bigger money. Think
   Soros or Gates.

4. Yes, I am exactly suggesting that rich kids can fund political parties.
   This is true of Labour, Conservatives, Liberals and Monster Raving
   Loonies. We don't - unless I've missed something - have state funding
   of political parties in this country. Only Labour had substantial
   non-hereditary funding from the unions. Since this has now almost all
   gone, they are dependent as anyone else on private individual donors.
   It comes from businessmen and big firms rather than landed gentry. Is
   that better, worse, or the same?

5. Finally, I'm not aware that there's ever been a democratic principle
   that money shouldn't buy too much power, has there? I just thought it
   was 'everyone gets a vote'. Since people go into government to get rich
   these days, shouldn't there be some wealth outside of that clique to
   oppose them when they (inevitably) go bad?

And yes, I'm trying to give a few shibboleths a good kicking. You have to, 
or they're just prejudices...

Rab.


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