>Why in the hell should the Rockefeller’s of today be billionaires?
Because we live in a system which rewards good genes, and that is a very good thing. By instituting a generational wealth tax you will be killing the human desire for wealth on a generational timescale.
Where does the money go? To other people i assume, you have now created a system where the evolutionary incentive is to leech from the system contributing as little as you can get away with. We live in such a system today but at-least there are some benefits to contributing more, those benefits are inherently that you can turn wealth into more children and transfer that wealth to them.
This is a not good line of thinking. Good genes? What does that mean, greed? Competitiveness? What about positive human traits like empathy, compassion, generosity and contentment? The things that make society work in the first place? Plus it's not like billionaires have more kids. "Leeches" aren't poisoning the gene pool... Your "leeches" are the gene pool.
I agree we should strive for a system which incentivises empathy, compassion, generosity and contentment.
Billionares do not have more kids but wealthy people have the capacity to have more healthy offspring, irregardless if they actually do.
I have said nothing about poisoning the gene pool, i am not a eugenicist and far from it. But every system has free-riders (leeches) as game theory predicts, we should try to counteract this behaviour not reward it.
I'm very sceptical about the claim that the incentive to earn staggering amounts of money goes away if your great-great-grandchildren cannot profit from it. Caring about your own children and grandchildren makes sense because you actually get to meet them, but at some point most people probably don't care about their far-far relatives.
Also, is this really your main motivation if you're Jeff Bezos? To make even more money? Doesn't the money stop mattering after the first 100 million and you're simply staying at Amazon because that's what you actually like doing? (Including having influence, shaping the future of commerce, etc etc)
>I'm very sceptical about the claim that the incentive to earn staggering amounts of money goes away if your great-great-grandchildren cannot profit from it.
I'ts not that simple, we are talking about evolutionary timescales here. It's very easy to see that if we live in a universe where accumulating wealth will not benefit your descendants, then accumulating wealth is an energy and time sink which will be selected against.
As for the second point i have no idea what Bezoz's motivations are.
Because we live in a system which rewards good genes, and that is a very good thing. By instituting a generational wealth tax you will be killing the human desire for wealth on a generational timescale.
Where does the money go? To other people i assume, you have now created a system where the evolutionary incentive is to leech from the system contributing as little as you can get away with. We live in such a system today but at-least there are some benefits to contributing more, those benefits are inherently that you can turn wealth into more children and transfer that wealth to them.