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I guess the counter question is whether there is something virtuous about spending all your money before you die.
Well, you are putting your money back into society, creating jobs. So yes. That is better then not doing those things.
It's not sitting around collecting dust.
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To be honest, I'd recommend just giving as directly as you can. Right now, I ordered remote teaching equipment for teachers in my community. You can too. Identify people doing good important things, and give them money to do it. Especially if you give resources to volunteers doing genuinely good work in your community, it has a huge multiplier effect.
This is a common viewpoint, but quite different from OP's. $5000 can save a person from Malaria or it can buy all the history teachers at a first world school document cameras. No doubt, both are worthy causes, but if you are choosing between which change to make in the world, one thought is to choose things like the former, which are seen to do more good for the same resources.
I've also seen the impact of organizations which promise to spend money to save people there, and it's not always pretty. You can't serve two causes well. Picking between Western donors and local recipients, successful NGOs must choose to serve the former and not the latter. That often just distorts markets and causes its own problems.
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There are two reasons to support a hefty inheritance tax on wealth over $X million. First, it raises revenue to help fill the deficit. More importantly, it is friction against generational wealth. Bill Gates (and his father) have for decades supported inheritance tax and gave this as the explicit reason.
In a "free" society, what basis does society have a right to say how much stuff you can amass? That or we stop pretending we live in a free society. I want society out of my business... if I want to give it away that's my choice.. if I want my kids to live like kings that's also my choice.
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Most of the worlds money is sitting in the Cayman’s after-all, or hidden away as art investments inside of storage containers.
Is it really? Where can I read about it?
I humbly encourage everyone to make giving a larger part of your life. Consider giving at least 10% of your income to cost-effective charities -- because cost-effective charities can do thousands of times more good than merely regular charities. So your $1,000 donation can do as much good as $1 million, if given well. Join others: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
To be honest, I'd recommend just giving as directly as you can. Right now, I ordered remote teaching equipment for teachers in my community. You can too. Identify people doing good important things, and give them money to do it. Especially if you give resources to volunteers doing genuinely good work in your community, it has a huge multiplier effect.
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An Open Letter from Economists on the Estate Tax To whom it may concern: Spend your money on riotous living – no tax; leave your money to your children – the tax collector gets paid first. That is the message sent by the estate tax. It is a bad message and the estate tax is a bad tax. The basic argument against the estate tax is moral. It taxes virtue – living frugally and accumulating wealth. It discourages saving a…
Spending money rather than accumulating it is, on the ballance, better for everyone else in the economy. Positing it as an unalloyed good to be frugal and accumulate wealth (especially at massive scale) is extremely murky at best.
However saving can hurt growth by reducing consumption.
Savings can be thought of as a steady state rate of saving that the economy has adjusted for. Saving is a higher order effect that causes an increase in the savings rate, temporarily depriving the economy of the level of consumption it expects.
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Namely something after yourself is tacky. But what should buildings be named after? Famous scientists? Planets? Feeney seems like an awesome guy but sadly in 100 years nobody will know his name!
And yet, I would venture to guess he’s more satisfied than somebody trying to get his name onto a big building. Recognizing what’s important to you and knowing that you have it is what’s actually valuable.
I humbly encourage everyone to make giving a larger part of your life. Consider giving at least 10% of your income to cost-effective charities -- because cost-effective charities can do thousands of times more good than merely regular charities. So your $1,000 donation can do as much good as $1 million, if given well. Join others: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
At the same time, I think it is a bad systemic solution to rely on charitable giving to solve large-scale problems.
Imagine an island with 100 residents, each with $100. Their moral compass varies randomly from Mr. Rogers all the way to a few outright sociopaths. Each day, everyone decides how much to donate. The kinder people donate more because they're kinder. The selfish assholes obviously don't.
What does tomorrow look like? Well, now all the good people are a little poorer and have a little less power. The sociopaths are richer and stronger. They use their edge to secure a little more power, maybe skim a little more off the top.
Watch that island for a few years and what do you start to see? A few avaricious monsters with all the wealth and a horde of poor decent folks doing their best to distribute fewer and fewer scraps equitably amongst themselves.
This is the real magic of taxes. Because taxes are morally neutral. They don't preferentially take more money away from the most decent folks. Ultimately there are some bad selfish people out there and if you don't have some way of forcibly reducing their power, they will take it all. Taxation backed by the force of government is one of the least violent ways of doing that.
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John Harvard and Elihu Yale seemed to have avoided this fate. And Leland Stanford had the same name as his father, so maybe founding a university is the way to go here?
Most people just gloss over the names from experience, without caring much about who it was named after / the origin.
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> The basic argument against the estate tax is moral. It taxes virtue – living frugally and accumulating wealth. Is there something virtuous about hoarding wealth?
I don't have an answer, but to flip that question: If the very wealthy can live on passive income from accumulated wealth, then why can't all of society?