Re: Income distribution [and growth]

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruce McFarling" <ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> And, yes, financial wealth is an internal positive feedback
> ... it is information generated as a result of a process
> that serves to modify the operation of the process.  At a
> certain level of wealth holdings, the holder can live on
> the returns and continue to accumulate, which is how an
> aristocracy of wealth continues to emerge.
>
> The only clear way to break down the development of an
> aristocracy of wealth is to switch death duties from
> the estate to the recipient.  Syd Carroll has proposed:
>
> (1) $1m gifts received tax free
> (2) 2nd $1m taxed at a 25% gift rate
> (3) 3rd $1m taxed at a 50% gift rate
> (4) 4th $1m taxed at a 75% gift rate
> (5) All additional taxed at a 100% gift rate
>
> That would eliminate the level of wealth holdings that
> are self-perpetuating over multiple generations.  And,
> after all, it is a voluntary death duty, since as long
> as the will of the deceased hands out the funds in $1m
> blocks, it would be gift tax free, unless of course
> some of the beneficiaries had already received sizable
> bequests.
>
>
=================================

Blackstone:

"For naturally speaking, the instant a man ceases to be, he
ceases to have any dominion; else if he had a right to dispose of his
acquisitions one moment beyond
his life, he would also have a right to direct their disposal for ages after
him; which would be
highly absurd and inconvenient."



Knut Wicksell:

"From [the social] point of view the main thing to do would be to take energetic
measures to prevent
the unearned accumulation of riches (and with it mostly also their uneconomic
use) which is now
encouraged by law and custom.

"The only practical way to reach this goal appears to me to lie in the
recognition that any right of
inheritance, bequest or gift necessarily lies in two parts. There is the right
to give and the right
to receive. These must be strictly distinguished and each treated on its own
merit. To restrict the
right to give more than is absolutely necessary even now often runs counter to
our ideas of justice
and equity and also may be seriously questioned on economic grounds.

The right of inheritance taken in the second, and more proper, sense of the word
as the unlimited
right to receive must, if at all be justified in quite different terms. Unless I
am much mistaken,
it rests *on a now obsolete conception of social and family relationships.*"