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Wouldn't the same issue be there with 100% IHT. If your parents live in London there's a good chance you wouldn't be able to afford that property (or one in the area) when they died, giving the same issue of splitting up communities.

Given life expectancies these days, I'm guessing that most 40 - 50 year olds will have flown the nest by the time their folks have carked it.

You're also ignoring social mobility, which is quite possibly minimal for those in social housing.

pass the right on to dependents.

Can you / have you ever been able to do that?

What if mum and dad needed a house but daughter earns millions?

From my experience most people can't afford to literally inherit their parents' property. They inherit the estate with all its liabilities and sell the property to satisfy creditors, then buy something smaller with what's left.

And the people most likely to be shafted are those most in need, and those least able to do anything about it.

Not quibbling with you, becasue I don't think I disagee with you, but how is that 'unearned'? Is there a specific defintion of what consitiutes earned and unearned that's used by economists? I know thy have all sorts of terms that mean specific stuff

that so black and white. only rich and poor.

nobody should be able pass on whatever wealth they have, to spite the posh cunts. great. henry and poppy will just find another way to get 'round it and shaz and wayne have to sell the astra to pay for mum's funeral.

"I also am an advocate of the 100% inheritance tax - we need a leveller so every child is equal."

the only way to do that would be to kill you parents when you are born. do you think the house would go into the children's name early doors, or some other method of swerving? of course and before you know it, the povvs are even further behind.

Is that so?

Define "fail"?

Am I a "fail" for getting working tax credits...? (hopefully not needed once I finish my OU degree which in England has gotten massively more expensive decreasing social mobility putting it out of reach of some...)?

Is somebody a "fail" for being able to hold down a min wage job and getting priced out by fuckers with more money than one could possible need...?

Society is not a 0 sum game when there still is enough food and money for all and it's badly divided.

Earned income is wages in return for labour. Unearned income is rent, dividends etc that come from owning land or capital.

I think Thomas Picketty made the point that income from wages has been going down over the last few decades, while unearned income has been going up. He used a few more words though.

Well my point is that broadly for one person to succeed, there are inevitably a large number who have to fail.

This is inaccurate. We don't live in a zero-sum game.

I need to get me some unearned monies.

From now on could everyone send me a penny tapped to a post card every time they post please?

"Lose out" would have been more appropriate, for sure.

I'm as against 100% as I'm against 0%. Like in most thing, there is a compromise that would be better than the extreme. Fuck knows what it is tho.

Can you explain to me how somebody like Mike Ashley becomes a billionaire, then?

I didn't say we live in a zero-sum game...

I didn't say we live in a zero-sum game...

No. You wrote

Well my point is that broadly for one person to succeed, there are inevitably a large number who have to fail.

Which implies a zero-sum game.

Which we don't have.

Which isn't to say that some people may get still rich, and some people may still get poor. Sometimes from the same thing.

But there is no inevitability about it.

Some will become rich by exploiting others financially (such as Mike Ashley with crappy contracts, etc).

There are other areas of innovation though, Mark Zuckerberg for instance.

Mike Ashley

How awful Mike Ashley isn't really relevant. He's an extreme example and that is why it gets so much press.

Someone making sure others fail as they tread on them on the way up is not the same as there being a general requirement for the others to fail in order for that person to succeed. That's just being a c*nt.

Mike Ashley you say...

I was implying that someone almost necessarily has to be exploited somewhere down the line for the boss to afford that third holiday home.

Which is to imply a zero-sum game.

Which we don't have.

Has this always been the case or has it only just started now?

If we accept the premise (and some do) it's an issue which emerges with forms of capital (i.e., money). When some can become rich without producing anything, they are consuming the goods others produced without providing anything to the total number of goods in the world.

Although Rousseau goes back further and blames metallurgy.

I'm not sure what we're struggling with here.

If you get paid a salary, that salary is calculated to ensure that someone else makes money from your work.

That doesn't imply a zero-sum game. It implies that we live within a system which encourages (or necessitates) exploitation at almost every level.

So to bring it back around to the actual point: To say that someone "earns" something suggests that they gain it deservedly. To me that seems to ignore the realities of how they got to be in such a privileged position, and suggests that the person at the bottom equally deserves to be there.

You don't have to agree and I'll happily be proven wrong, but don't put words in my mouth.