While Republicans defend inherited wealth, a principled conservative should want to reform inheritance, perhaps even radically. I will base my case on professed conservative principles about welfare. My use of the term “welfare” will be a sloppy, but necessary shorthand. After all, there is no official government program called “welfare.” Rather, it is a vague term used to collect a range of programs and policies in which public resources are provided to people. Now on to the conservative arguments against inheritance.
Way back in April, 2020 Senator Lindsey Graham argued public financial relief for the coronavirus would incentivize workers to leave their jobs. While making this argument during a pandemic was new, it is a stock argument used against welfare. Rod Blum, a Republican representative from Iowa, said “Sometimes we need to force people to go to work. There will be no excuses for anyone who can work to sit at home and not work.” Donald Trump, whose fortune was built on inheritance, has said that “The person who is not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that’s working his and her ass off.” While this might sound like description of Trump, it was his criticism of welfare. In general terms, the conservative argument is that if a person receives welfare, then they would not have an incentive to work. Since this is bad, welfare should be restricted or perhaps even eliminated.
Conservatives also advance utilitarian arguments against welfare, arguing it is bad because of the harm it causes. In addition to allegedly destroying the incentive to work, it is also supposed to harm the moral character of the recipient and, on a larger scale, create a culture of dependency and a culture of entitlement. If we take these arguments seriously, then they would also tell against inheritance. In fact, this is an old argument in philosophy.
Mary Wollstonecraft contends that hereditary wealth is morally wrong because it produces idleness and impedes people from developing their virtues. This mirrors the conservative arguments against welfare, and they should, if they are consistent, agree with Wollstonecraft.
Conservatives also profess to favor the free market, meritocracy and earning one’s way. They speak often of how people should pull themselves up by bootstraps. In accord with these professed values, they oppose programs like affirmative action, free school lunch, and food stamps. The usual arguments focus on two factors. The first is that such programs provide people with unearned resources and this is wrong. The second is that such programs provide people with an unfair advantage over others, which is also wrong. It is obvious that the same reasoning would apply to inheritance.
Inheritance is unearned. So, if receiving unearned resources is wrong, then inheritance would also be wrong. It could be countered that people can earn an inheritance, that it might be granted because of their hard work or some other relevant factor. While such cases would be worth considering, earning it by hard work is not the way one qualifies for an inheritance. However, an earned inheritance would certainly not be subject to this argument.
Disparities in inheritance also confer unearned advantages. For example, suppose that both of us want to open a business in our small town which can only support one business of that kind. For the sake of the arguments, let us assume we are roughly equal in abilities, so with a fair start there is about a 50% chance that either of us would win the competition. But suppose that I inherit $1,00,000 and you start out with a $1,000 loan from your parents. This provides me with a huge advantage. I can purchase more and better equipment. I can get a better location for my business. I can out-advertise you. I can bleed your business to death by taking a loss you cannot sustain. I will not say it is impossible for you to beat me and I can imagine scenarios in which I fail. For example, the townsfolk might rally to support you and boycott me because of my unfair advantage. But barring such made-for-tv miracles, I will almost certainly win.
Even if we were not in direct competition, I would still have a huge unearned advantage over you. If you decided to go to the next town over and I wished you well, I would still be more likely to succeed than you because my inheritance advantage would be considerable. If receiving unmerited advantages is wrong, then significant inheritance would be wrong as well.
Since conservatives generally profess loath welfare and love inheritance, they would need a principled way to break the analogy between the two. There are ways to do this.
An argument can be built on claiming that inheritance is a voluntary gift of resources, while welfare involves taking tax money from people who do not want it to be used that way. The obvious reply is that if we vote for welfare (either directly or through representatives), then it is voluntary. This, of course, leads into the broader area of democratic decision making. But if we accept democracy and our democracy accepts welfare, then we agree to it in the same way we agree to any law or policy we might not like.
Another argument can be made by pointing out that inheritance often goes to relatives while welfare does not. But this is not relevant to the argument that welfare is bad because of its harm. After all, it is getting money that one has not earned that is supposed to be the problem, not whether it was given willingly or by a relative. One could try to argue that resources given by relatives are special and will not make people lazy while state resources will, but that seems absurd. Some will be tempted to argue that those who inherit wealth tend to be a better sort of people, but this seems an unreasonable path to follow.
Another argument can be made asserting that inherited wealth is earned in some manner while welfare is not. While this has some appeal, it falls apart quickly. First, some people do earn some of their welfare (broadly construed) by paying for it when they are working. For example, if Sally works for ten years paying taxes and gets fired when her company moves overseas, then she is getting back money from a system she contributed to. So, Sally earned that welfare. Second, if a person did work for their inheritance, it is not actually an inheritance, but something earned. If, for example, someone worked in the family business for pay or shares in the company, then they have earned their pay or shares. But merely working there does not, obviously, entitle a person to own the business after the death of the current owner. Otherwise, the workers should all share in the inheritance. So, this sort of argument fails.
It might be pointed out that if someone opposes inheritance, then they must oppose welfare. One reply is to accept this. If welfare makes people idle and inflicts moral harm, then it would be as bad as inheritance and should be limited or eliminated. A second reply is to argue that welfare helps people in need and is analogous to family helping family in times of trouble rather than being analogous to inheritance, in which one simply receives regardless of need or merit.
To pre-empt some straw person attacks on my arguments, my view is not that inheritance should be eliminated. It would be absurd to argue that Sally cannot inherit her grandmother’s assault rifle collection. It would be foolish to argue that Sam cannot inherit his mom’s cabin where he learned to hunt deer. Rather, my view is consistent with the conservative arguments: inheritance should be reduced to a level that does not cause harm to those inheriting it and does not confer an unfair advantage. While a full theory of inheritance would require a book to develop, the core of my view is that inheritance should be taxed in a progressive manner and the tax income should be used to increase fair competition. A good place to start would be funding public schools. Funding low-interest loans for poor people creating businesses would also be a good option. This has the appeal that it takes nothing away from anyone who is still alive; people would merely get less unearned wealth. To use an analogy, it is like a tax on lottery winnings—people are would just get less for winning and would not be losing anything they earned. In this way, a tax on inheritance is morally better than income tax on wages, which takes away from what someone has earned.
It could be argued, as the Republicans often do, that taxing inheritance would be a double tax: the money or property is taxed, then taxed again when it is inherited. While this seems a clever argument, it has two obvious problems. The first is that the person inheriting the money or property is taxed only once. They do not pay a tax when the person dies and then pay another tax when they inherit it. Second, this alleged “double tax” is not unique to inheritance. When I make money, tax is taken out. When I buy a book on Amazon sold by a friend, I pay sales tax. When my friend gets their royalty, they pay a tax on that. If they buy a book of mine with the money they got from me buying their book, the money is taxed again when they pay the sales tax. Then I am taxed again when I pay my tax on my income. This is not to say that all this taxing is good, just that the notion that inheritances are subject to a unique and crazy double tax is absurd.