cthulu2016 (2,709 posts)
On the day you were born
Last edited Sun Jun 10, 2012, 04:26 PM USA/ET - Edit history (1)
Land is the starting place of all wealth because everything has to be somewhere.
On the day you were born, you were born into a world where all useful property belonged to someone who was born before you were. And for some reason, by virtue of being born first they had rights to acquisition of property, and to continue effective ownership of that property after their death.
You, as a human being, were born into a world where you had no intrinsic right to exist on Earth, despite your obvious existence. There was no so much as a 6'x3' plot of dirt you were entitled to lie on. (Unless someone, usually a parent, had saved you a place in line before you were born.)
This cuts against human nature, but in the abstract I can see no compelling moral argument for inheritance.
I cannot see that a person's child has any greater right to property accumulated by that parent than does any other child.
Interesting, however, we do not frame it that way. We frame it in an even more offensive way, which is that the parent has the right to dispense resources to the child, even after death.
The rights of the dead are greater than the rights of the living!
How could such a perverse moral situation have arisen? Because the people who happened to be born first wrote the rules by which those born later must live.
