Philanthropy

 This is a very useful article about philanthropy.

As Brian Leiter rightly points out when commenting on this article,

There should be no need for philanthropy; the state should impose an essentially confiscatory tax on all income and wealth above some appropriate threshhold ($10 million?  25 million?).  Then we could have a civilized society!

As I've said before, I like the idea of an inheritance tax acting as this essentially confiscatory tax.

Money makes money, and inter-generational wealth often grows from merely being there and not because of any special ability/effort of the children of wealthy parents.

As I see it, wealthy parents deserve, and have the right, to give a comfortable life to their children.  But excessive inter-generational wealth creates many social problems and harms.

My suggestion is that each child receives an inheritance of something like at most 100 years times the median yearly income (in New Zealand this is currently 100 x $52,000 = $5.2 million), and then any remaining assets are 100% taken as tax.

This inheritance would still be enough so that all children of super-rich parents wouldn't have to work a day in their lives, and could comfortably live off their parents' money.  For example, they could have a $2 million home, and then invest the remaining $3 million, with a simple 5% return giving them $150,000 a year to live on.  These children would still be comfortably in the rich category without working at all.

I read that Donald Trump inherited over US$413 million.  I wonder what the world would be like if he had been given just one or two percent of that and then lived his life in comfortable, lazy obscurity.