16 Comments

It's been said that bad ideas are immortal, and the parallels between Britain's death duties and the Harris "unrealized gains tax" proposal certainly seems consistent with that. Your analysis put me in mind of an observation from a great British mind, the late Cyril Northcote Parkinson:

-- Wasting the labour of the people “under the pretence of caring for them” is exactly what our governments do. Freedom is founded on ownership of property.... It cannot exist where the rulers own everything, nor even when they concede some limited right of tenure. But the modern belief is that spendable income is a concession of the State. The taxation which is intended to promote equality, the taxation which exceeds the real public need, and above all the tax which is so graduated as to prevent the accumulation of capital, is inconsistent with freedom. Against a State which owns everything, the individual has neither the means of defence nor anything to defend....

There are many human achievements, including some of the finest, which need more than a single lifetime for completion. The individual can compose a symphony or paint a canvas, build up a business or restore order in a city. He cannot build a cathedral or grow an avenue of oak trees. Still less can he gain the stature essential to statesmanship in a highly developed and complex society. There is a need for continuity of effort, spread over several generations, and for just such a continuity as governments lack. Given the party system more especially, under the democratic form of rule, policy is continually modified or reversed. A family can be biologically stable in a way that a modern legislature is not. It is to families, therefore, that we look for such stability as society may need. But how can the family function if subject to crippling taxes during every lifetime and partial confiscation with every death? How can one generation provide the springboard for the next? Without such a springboard, all must start alike, and none can excel; and where none can excel nothing excellent will result. --

May God bless and keep you.

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Very well said

Really appreciate your thoughts on this

Civilization ends when men no longer plant trees in the shade of which they will never sit, but under which their grandchildren will. Death taxes/wealth taxes/etc encourage the decision to no longer plant those trees

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You've put me in mind of the steadily declining birthrates throughout Europe and North America. Not only are we ever less likely to plant those trees, it's becoming ever less likely that there'll be grandchildren to sit under them. What follows, few will enjoy.

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Yeah, there's that as well and it's quite sad

One small positive, a glimmer of hope, is that the peers who survived the death taxes seem to have a reasonable number of children. So those connected to the old ways and who survived the government's onslaught are preserving the fire and planting the trees

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Running out of other people's money is a distinct possibility.

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Yes, that would happen pretty quickly. They forget that most wealth is liquid now and people could just turn their stocks to crypto temporarily and jump to a tax haven. Wouldn't be that hard and would destroy the system

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Kamala is the mouthpiece (no pun intended) for the same people who control Biden. She’ll be an excellent puppet for those who understand your essay outlines the plan, but they seek the destruction of America.

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Ah, yes, I should have made it clearer that all of them want this sort of thing and think like that

It was just especially galling to me that she supported it despite the unpopularity

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Paying tax on UNREALIZED GAINS makes no sense. Who's coming up with these silly economic plans? How can you tax people on income they haven't made? https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/you-just-watch-my-word

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Communists are coming up with it

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Communism's goal is to destroy the monarchies and the aristocracies.

"Democracy" was its tool.

In WW1, we replaced Westphalian monarchies with centralized governments.

The Depression and WW2 turned those central governments into the all encompassing Agencies system.

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Yes, very true

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Thought the monarchies had already largely been relplaced in practice in the decades before WW1. The Reichstag in Germany, post-Napoleon III France, and the 1911 Parliament Bill in England particularly come to mind

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None of these socialists policies are proposed as experiments in the sense of "maybe they'll work this time." They (and we should) all know how these policies will end, every time. The British socialists explicitly set out to destroy Britain and are now doing their best to finish off the last remnants. Such policies are not wrong because they don't work. They not only don't work, but destroy, because they are tyrannical.

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Well said, I completely agree

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Absolutely awesome article. A recent subscriber and overjoyed to come across real analysis rather than prejudice. Britain did not rule a huge chunk of the world because it had a bigger army or good weather but because it had minarchism and an Aristocracy that outperformed the others rather than the Kakistocracy it has now.

The British Empire has gone, even in Britain, but it's important to learn the lessons it holds just as we learned the lessons of the Roman Empire.

Let's hope Millie, Bukele, Musk/DOGE manage to keep rowing back on Kakistocracy and Maxarchism.

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