Guest column: Inheriting an old problem

Jon Saltzman's March 9 guest column, "On even ground," asks a question that I suspect he didn't think through: What if we couldn't rely on the success of the generations before us?

No one could use a tool they had not figured out or someone close hadn't discovered recently. Language probably wouldn't exist, since parents couldn't teach their children how to talk. Plants and animals couldn't be domesticated or bred, except for a few generations. We'd be hunter-gatherers with no culture, knowledge or wealth — with short lifespans and unfulfilling relationships.

Where do I sign up?

Perhaps it would help to pay more attention to what Martin Luther King Jr. and Betty Friedan 0actually advocated. Sensible people realize reality is inherently unfair, but some unfairness is artificial.

Equality of opportunity in the sense of advantages will never be realized, but equality of opportunity in the sense of social or legal restrictions can be. Restrictions based on birth, race or sex are generally artificial (notable exceptions exist, such as pregnancy), and the artificial ones should be done away with.

The forces that prevent a sudra, the lowest traditional Indian class, from becoming a merchant should be abolished. The forces that prevent someone without capital from investment, cannot be abolished.

Unfairness that is built into the nature of reality cannot be done away with, and attempts to do so end in blood and tears. Perhaps Saltzman should meditate more on the outcome of the French Revolution and the subsequent seven-year duration of the Saint-Simon experiment. I wouldn't call that "thriving."

When one child is born with the genes to be a genius and another is born with genes that will make knowing a thousand words a skill that will take decades to acquire, no amount of wishing or activity will make the second child as smart as the first. The first can be reduced to the level of the second, but such a villainous act would worsen their life and the lives of everyone around them.

Saltzman also limits himself to a inheritor's perspective when he talks about Paris Hilton. Make of that what you will. The other side to the inheritance equation is the person giving away the wealth.

Who would say Conrad Hilton didn't deserve his wealth? And if he deserves to own his wealth, certainly he should deserve to use his wealth, and one use for wealth is giving it away. How far someone plans for the future tends to scale with their age — young children make decisions based on the very short term, teenagers based on the short term, adults based on the long term and elders on the very long term.

Someone with only a decade or two left to live nevertheless makes plans that span many decades because that person's experience has been built over many decades. People choose when to retire and what to do with their money during retirement based on the laws governing inheritance.

When they can give away everything to their children or their chosen institutions, they work longer and harder to accumulate more so they can do more. When a sizable portion of their estate is taxed, they work shorter hours and less strenuously, since their accumulating power is reduced. Were their estate confiscated entirely at death, they would have no reason to save anything beyond what would last the remainder of their lives, and would retire as soon as they could afford it.

Abolish inheritance? Hardly. We should celebrate it, and build what we can for the next generation. Inheritances do not get larger or more prevalent through wishing.

Matthew Graves is a senior economics and physics major. He can be reached at vaniver at gmail dot com.