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Again, it's not that dead people have power to coerce the living. It's that living people have the power to coerce each other in the future, including in futures where they're dead.
When I take out a loan, I'm getting money in exchange for signing a contract obligating me to pay it back over time. If I die, the contract should remain in force, or it prevents the contract from being made in the first place, and deprives me of my current right to sign such contracts.
IDK what you're talking about here. It's not like the mortgage goes away. The bank gets its money back, often when the home is sold. If mortgage payments were actually voided, banks would never give old people mortgages in the first place.
Semantics. I don't believe you should have such 'current rights', because they are future 'dead people's rights'.
I find it ludicrous that some dead people control giant foundations for decades when they are incapable of enforcing their will or even reacting to things. It's like worshipping a statue. Fake veal or whatever the christians call it.
They get insurance that pays off if the borrower dies.
Not semantics. I currently have a mortgage. I think I have a right to make mortgage agreements that involve the bank getting its money back in the event of my death.
That's just not true.
At their most fundamental level, one important thing laws need to do is reflect reality. And in reality, there are innumerable ways to do things that echo for generations after your death.
The death itself is fundamentally unimportant. It's not like it matters that much whether you die and send your money to an NGO, or send your money to the NGO 1 second before death--either way you're choosing, while alive, to give your money to an organization with long-term plans.
What's the alternative? Confiscate the money from the NGO because the donor died soon after donating? Require that all organizations only make year-long plans, because nobody has the right to plan further in advance than that?
I get the complaint about unaccountable NGOs, and dead people exerting overly much influence, but you're taking this to quite an extreme.
An older relative of mine died, and the mortgage was instantly paid off by the insurance he and the bank had contracted with the loan, so I was going off that. But in any case, the loan is also guaranteed by the house, and so the bank will give out such mortgages to the elderly, even if, as I recommend, people have no power after death.
I don't know where you're getting this from. The NGO should be taxed normally, they don't have to give back anything, what's done is done. When the man dies however, his assets should be heavily taxed before it reaches any NGO or heirs.
An echo is not equal to the original sound. The dead are not equal to the living. I respect your rights, partly because I'm nice, partly because you have the power to defend them. Unlike the dead. What could be more important than this distinction? And I'm not interested in being nice to inanimate objects.
I brought up the NGO as an example of someone exerting influence decades after their own death, something you have an issue with. The point was to demonstrate that really this has little to do with the actual moment of death--it's quite easy to set up the NGO while still alive. Creating an inheritance tax the way you have in mind will do nothing at all, because people can just give their money away soon before death. You'd just end up with everyone giving their assets to their children years ahead of time, then living in "their son's house" and subsisting off of "their son's retirement account" until death.
Sure, that's a problem I acknowledge. I'd have to tax live gifts to children, though the argument there is weaker than in the inheritance case.
But the state taxes you whatever you do: working, buying, owning a house, making capital gains etc (a lot of it is economically productive, and in theory entirely yours), so I never understand the 'double dipping' complaints, or how people get offended when a new tax is proposed: "But it's my money, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, and I want my kids to get it"
"Okay, but it was also your money when they took part of your salary, then when you bought something with it, and when your investments paid off, and the public media tax, and the car licence tax and so on.... it's not double dipping, it's infinite dipping, you're on a merry-go-round of taxes, so what's one more at this point?" .
And no matter what guys like @The_Nybbler think, not all discussion of taxes is some dishonest ploy by his blue enemies to raise taxes. I would like overall taxes and spending to be slashed, starting with the pensions and welfare. We should be able to discuss which taxes are better (obviously inheritance, wealth, property, tobacco, congestion, consumption, and speeding tickets) without the bad faith accusations.
You're setting yourself up for failure when you start these conversations by talking about whether dead people have any right to their assets at all. Sure, it's possible to discuss which taxes are best, but you've planted your flag way off in one extreme where the moment someone dies, their wishes become irrelevant, but only if their wishes involve what's best for their kids.
I've tried to make it clear why this doesn't make sense. Society in general is not structured this way. Changing how contracts work to make them void upon death is just idiotic. It violates the rights of living people to make decisions about their own futures. Furthermore, it's self-defeating, because people can easily get around the law in any number of ways.
I want to be able to buy a coffin, and pay for my own funeral, before I die. Whether you realize it or not, you're advocating for a society where this is impossible. Any contract I make that involves paying for a funeral is void upon my death--the company can just run off with my money.
We can talk about optimal tax structures but first you need to understand that you're just wrong about this. There's no point discussing whether the optimal inheritance tax is 1% or 100% with someone who still doesn't recognize it as a tax in the first place.
I'm not doing PR, you know. I often phrase my opinions in a deliberately provocative manner to poke the bear, encourage discussion and the questioning of assumptions. "We're living in a necrocracy, sheeple!".
Let's say you organized your funeral where there'd be a bonfire of priceless works of art, destroying hundreds of brand-new washing machines , slaughtering and burning 10,000 heads of cattle. I do find that a bit perverse.
Likewise, sometimes your organs can save another human - it should not be allowed to be buried with such treasures.
You would not make such a contract obviously. If your family and friends care about you, I'm sure they will organize something.
You're testing my patience here. This is perverse whether it's your funeral or some other party. As I've said like 3 times now, it has nothing to do with your death!
The same goes for inheritance taxes in general. You can talk about taxing them, but don't bring death into it, because it functionally makes no difference whether the money is inherited before or after death.
Or I could still do it myself in this bizarro world, but I'd have to go through a convoluted legal process to do so. For example, I could build a nonprofit with the sole stated goal of giving me a funeral, hire someone to run the nonprofit, and then give them enough money to pay for the funeral. Now they have an obligation, not to me, but to the nonprofit itself, to abide by its mission. I'm sure I could come up with a dozen different ways to accomplish the same thing.
If your opinion is actually that contracts with dead people should be voided, there's nothing "deliberately provocative" about that, you just don't understand contracts.
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Why does the bank get the house instead of the government via inheritance taxes?
They have the greater claim to the estate. A dead man is like a bankrupt company: first the creditors get paid. The state gets the leftover equity.
Why? Their contract was with a dead man, it should no longer be in force. Are only banks allowed to enter into these contracts that extend past the death of the counterparty, or could a living man make a contract with his children and have that take precedence over the state when he dies? Maybe we could call it something like a "will"?
The mortgaged house did not fully belong to the dead man when he was alive to begin with. Since he could not dispose of the mortgaged house as he pleased in life, he can't in death either.
The contract did not extend past the death, it ended: It said, paraphrasing: 'X will pay for 30 years and then gets the house. If X stops paying because of deadness for example, the house is sold and the proceeds shared according to the following formula:... , etc." .
No. I can't make a contract with you where we, for example, exchange goods, but both agree we won't pay the tax the state puts on such things.
If contracts with the dead really aren't valid, this wouldn't be true. If X stops paying because of deadness, there is no contract. The clause about selling the house and sharing the proceeds is part of the contract, so it's no longer valid. The bank just owns the house, period, they don't need to sell it or give away any of the proceeds if they don't want to.
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