Category: Economics

One argument against raising the minimum wage is based on the claim that doing so would hurt small businesses. This argument has some merit, at least for small businesses with narrow profit margins or low income. While companies like Amazon could increase wages while still making massive profits for upper management and shareholders, a small business that is barely making a profit could be hard pressed to increase wages.

 To use an imaginary example, suppose Larry owns Larry’s Lawn Care and pays his workers $10 an hour. He charges his customers $20 an hour for labor and has expenses of about $5 an hour, so Larry makes a profit of $5 for every hour an employee works. He also draws a salary for his work running the business and working on lawns and this is worked in the billing on top of the $20 per hour charged for labor.

But if the minimum wage were increased to $15 an hour, then Larry would make no profit unless he cut expenses or charged more. Charging more, some would argue, could make him lose customers which would lead to fewer hours of work for his employees. This could cause a loss of income or force him to fire people.

It could be countered that if Larry’s business breaks even while Larry is earning a wage for his own labor, then everything is good. Larry and his workers seem to be getting what they deserve within the context of what customers are willing to pay for the services. But if the business was experiencing a loss and could not make full payroll because the wages and cost of operating the business exceeded what customers would pay, then it can be claimed that the increase in wages hurt the business and employees. This is the sort of scenario used in making the small business argument against minimum wage. The reasoning is that because of the harms of increasing wages, they should not be increased.

But it must be noted operating costs (and such) are also a factor. In the lawn care example, if gas and equipment costs were lower, the lawn care business would have more income.  But it is usually not argued that these costs should be kept low by the government to aid small businesses and the burden of keeping small businesses profitable is usually put on the employees. One could argue that the state keeping operating costs low would hurt other businesses and thus hurt other employees, but this is a choice about who is harmed and how. Increasing what the customers pay would also shift the harm, which is also a choice. But one would need to sort out the impact of increasing prices in terms of how it would impact available hours and jobs. Interestingly, those who argue against minimum wage tend to accept that companies can raise prices to increase profits even when doing so could result in employees losing hours or jobs—in fact, companies are often rewarded financially for firing people.

To be consistent, someone who argues that increasing minimum wage is wrong because it would hurt employees by reducing hours or costing jobs must also argue that profitable policies that result in workers losing hours or jobs would be wrong. Otherwise, it would be evident that the argument has nothing to do with protecting employees and everything to do with protecting profit. An honest argument from such folk would be refreshing, which would be that wages should not be increased because owners would make less profit.

It is also often argued that the increase in wages would hurt small businesses because larger companies can afford to pay these wages while still being profitable. A reply is that if this is true, then small business could have an exception if they prove they would be unfairly harmed.

A second reply is that those who argue against increasing the minimum wage on this ground would also need to argue that small businesses should be protected from larger businesses in other ways. After all, if the minimum wage should not be increased because smaller businesses cannot compete with large businesses, then the state should also see to it that larger businesses do not enjoy other advantages over small businesses. If one is not willing to accept this view, then it is likely that one does not care about small businesses, one just does not want wages increased. At third reply is the harsh free market reply: if small businesses cannot compete, then they will go out of business just as they would if they cannot compete in other ways.

A final response to the small business argument is to point out that the argument can also be seen as making the case that minimum wage should not be increased because doing so would decrease the income of small business owners. This seems to assume that the owners are entitled to their profits. But employees can point out that not increasing the minimum wage (even if only to match inflation) reduces their income as inflation reduces the value of their wages. So, if reducing income is wrong, then not increasing the minimum wage to at least account for inflation would be wrong. After all the owners would still me making the same profit they were before (adjusted for inflation). As such, those who oppose increasing the minimum wage to at least account for inflation cannot consistently use the small business argument unless they are willing to be clear that what they are concerned with is the profits of the owners rather than alleged harm that might be caused to employees.

Long ago, when I was a student, student loans were mostly manageable. Over the years, the cost of college has increased dramatically, and student loans have become increasingly burdensome. There is also the issue of predatorial for-profit schools. Because of this debt burden, there have been proposals to address the student loan problem. Some have even proposed forgiving or cancelling student loans. This proposal has generated hostile responses, although Roxane Gay has advanced some well-reasoned arguments in its defense. I paid my relatively modest loans long ago, so my concern with is a matter of ethics rather than self-interest. In this essay and those to follow I will consider the ethics of student loan forgiveness and provide some logical assessment of various relevant arguments.

As Gay noted in the New York Times, Damon Linker tweeted that “I think Dems are wildly underestimating the intensity of anger college loan cancellation is going to provoke. Those with college debt will be thrilled, of course. But lots and lots of people who didn’t go to college or who worked to pay off their debts? Gonna be bad.” Linker was right. Even if there was not genuine grassroots anger at student loan forgiveness, Republicans and the right-wing media  generated rage against it. But is there any merit to the anger argument?

Put a bit simply, the anger argument against student loan forgiveness is that because federal student loan forgiveness would make many people angry, then it would be incorrect to do it. This is obviously the appeal to anger fallacy; a fallacy in which anger is substituted for evidence when making an argument. Formally, this version of the fallacy looks like this:

 

Premise 1: X would make people angry.

Conclusion: X is wrong or incorrect.

 

This is bad logic because the fact that something makes people angry has no connection to whether it is true or correct. People can be angry about claims that are true and enraged about things that are good. They can, of course, also be angry about claims that are false and enraged about things that are evil. But the anger people feel does not prove (or disprove) falseness or wrongness. A silly example illustrates this:

 

Premise 1: The triangle haters get angry when it is claimed that triangles have three sides.

Conclusion: Triangles do not have three sides. 

 

Somewhat less silly examples are as follows:

 

Premise 1: Some people got angry about the American colonies rebelling. 

Conclusion: The colonies were wrong to rebel.  

 

Premise 1: Some people are angry about evolution. 

Conclusion: Evolution does not occur.

 

Premise 1: Atheists would be angry if God exists.

Conclusion: God does not exist.

 

As these examples show, drawing a conclusion about the truth of a claim or the morality of something from people being angry is bad reasoning. As such, the anger people might feel about student loan forgiveness is irrelevant to whether it is the right thing to do. But perhaps there is a way to make a non-fallacious argument from anger. One way to do this is to switch from concerns about truth and morality to pragmatism. That is, perhaps it could be argued that the anger of some people would provide a practical reason to not have student loan forgiveness.

While this greatly oversimplifies things, pragmatic arguments are aimed at establishing what would be the most prudent or advantageous thing. This is an argument from consequences. The idea is that the correct choice is the one that generates the best consequences for those who matter. While people tend to think the correct choice is the one they think is best for them, working out an appeal to consequences requires arguing to establish who matters and how to assess the value of the consequences. Laying aside all these concerns, pragmatic arguments from anger can easily be made.

To illustrate, imagine that a politician sees the polls show that most voters are angry about student loan forgiveness and this anger is strong enough to influence their vote. From a pragmatic standpoint, the anger of their voters does give them a practical reason to oppose forgiveness: if they want to increase their chances of being re-elected, then they should oppose it. While this could be for selfish reasons (the politician might want to stay in office to keep cashing in on insider trading) it could also be for benevolent reasons (the politician might want to stay in office to try to improve the lives of their constituents). From a pragmatic standpoint responding to the anger could be the prudent or advantageous thing to do. While these pragmatic reasons can be strong motivating factors, they do not prove (or disprove) anything about the rightness or wrongness of student loan forgiveness. But there is still an option for using anger in a non-fallacious moral argument.

Utilitarianism, a view argued for by the likes of Bentham and Mill, is the moral view that the morality of an action depends on the consequences for those who are morally relevant. Put in simple terms, an action that creates more good for those who count would be better than an action that creates less good (or causes harm). Since utilitarian arguments deal with consequences, it is often possible to re-tool a pragmatic consequentialist argument into a moral argument. Here is how it could be done.

Suppose that there is good reason to believe that Linker is right and anger at any student loan cancellation “gonna be bad.” If the harms generated by this anger outweighs the benefit of the loan cancellation when considering all Americans, then the loan cancellation would be wrong. Thus, it would seem that the right sort of appeal to anger can work. But there is an obvious concern about the role of the anger in generating the harms.

If cancelling the loans itself resulted in greater harms than not doing so (such as pulling money from critical social programs), then it would seem right to not cancel them. But the anger argument rests on how people respond to the cancellation, not the harm done by the cancelling itself. That is, the harms in question would arise because of what people do because they are angry in response to the cancellation. This leads to an old ethical debate about how to factor in responses when doing the utilitarian calculation. On the one hand, it does seem reasonable to consider how people will respond when sorting out consequences. On the other hand, there is the obvious problem that people could force a change in the moral calculation by responding in ways that would create harms. That is, they could “rig” the moral argument by threatening to respond with terrible actions.

To use a fictional example, imagine a debate over raising minimum wage in which businesses said they would kill their minimum wage employees, their pets, and their loved ones if the wage was increased. In terms of consequences, this would make increasing the minimum wage extremely harmful and so it would be wrong to increase it. As an alternative fictional example, imagine the much-feared radical leftists threatened to kill business owners, their pets, and their loved ones if the minimum wage is not increased. This would make not increasing it wrong. But there is clearly a problem with assessing the morality of an action based on what the worst people might do in response to that action since this would make morality hostage to the worst people. One fix is to consider the action apart from such efforts to prevent the action by intentionally increasing the harms while also, obviously enough, assessing the ethics of these efforts. So, when considering student loan cancellation there is the moral issue of the consequences of the cancellation itself and there is the distinct moral issue of whether the responses to it would be morally appropriate or not. That is, we need to see if the anger against loan cancellation is morally warranted. If it is not, then the anger might have negative consequences but yielding to that anger would be wrong. In the next essay I will consider the fairness argument, free of anger.

When Democrats in congress propose benefits for Americans, such as a universal pre-K program, childcare benefits for working families, expansions of the child tax credit and the earned income credit, free college and so on many on the right (such as Fox News) engage in D&D. Not the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, but the Deficit argument and the Dependency argument.

The deficit argument, which can also be categorized as the “it costs too much” argument, is that such programs will cost too much money, thus increasing the deficit. Since increasing the deficit is claimed to be harmful, then these programs should not be implemented. Cost-benefit arguments are certainly sensible if they are made in good faith. While some on the right do make this argument in good faith, many do not.

While the philosophical problem of other minds shows that I cannot know the content of another’s mind (or even if they have one), a good general test for bad faith is the consistency test. If a person is making a good faith argument based on their professed concern about something, then they will have similar concerns in other similar situations. Naturally, there can be relevant differences that warrant not applying the same principle in other circumstances. In the case of the deficit argument, the test for bad faith is to see if those making the argument are consistently concerned about cost and the deficit. If so, then this can be reasonably taken as a good faith argument: they believe what they are arguing. If their concern is not consistent, then it is reasonable to suspect bad faith although people can be inconsistent for other reasons, such as being unaware of the inconsistency. Looking back on the previous Trump presidency (and other Republican administrations) and looking at the Big Beautiful Bill we can see that the right generally does not care about costs or deficits when it comes to spending money on or increasing the deficit for things they like, such as military expenditures, corporate subsidies, and tax cuts. As such, it is reasonable to conclude that they do not believe in their deficit argument and do not care about costs or deficits as such. This is not to say that their argument must thus be flawed or their claims untrue.

Bad faith argumentation is like (and can include) lying: it is a matter of intent and belief. To infer that someone’s argument must be fallacious or their claim’s false because they are arguing in bad faith would be to fall victim to the ad hominem fallacy. Just as person could be telling a “true lie” by making a true claim they believe is false to deceive, a person could make a good bad faith argument: the argument could have good logic and plausible premises, but the person making it does not believe in their own argument. So why not just assess the logic of the argument and truth of the claims?

While logical assessment should be done, determining whether an argument is made in bad faith is still important as a normative rather than logical matter. When someone makes a bad faith argument (or claim), they do not believe in their own argument (or claim). As such, other people are not under any moral obligation to take their bad faith argument or claim seriously. To use the example of lying, if I know someone is lying to me, my moral concern is not with whether their claim is true or not (that is a matter for critical thinking) but with their intention to deceive or manipulate me. As such, while I should not reject their claim out of hand (it could be a true lie) I should certainly not be influenced by their lie as they have forfeited the expectation that I will give them serious consideration.

As noted above, the right generally does not care about deficits and debt as such. To be fair, there are some who are consistent on this point and they have thus earned the normative right to be given due consideration. But those who have proven that they do not care about the deficit as such are just advancing a bad faith argument, they are engaging in deceit rather than good argumentation.

In closing, I want to stress that it does not follow that a bad faith argument must be a fallacy or that a bad faith claim must be false. Just as people can tell true lies, they can also advance good arguments in bad faith. As such, the argument that any proposal to help Americans who are not rich will cost too much should be given due consideration on its own merits and, of course, this should also apply when the right is running up the deficit with tax cuts, corporate subsidies, and military spending.

In addition to the deficit argument, many on the right also advance the Dependency argument. This will be considered in the next essay.

The people who have power in the United States tend to be white, male, straight, and (profess to be) Christian. This can be confirmed by a cursory look at who holds top positions in government, business, and academics. Membership in these groups confers advantages that increase the odds of having power. Before getting on with the discussion, I need to pre-empty some likely straw person attacks on my view.

First, even belonging to all four groups is no guarantee a person will have power. After all, there are straight, white men who have faith in Jesus yet are struggling with poverty and are powerless. Second, people do have power despite not being members of these groups. For example, I am aware that Oprah and Beyonce exist.  My claim is moderate: membership in one or more of these groups confers relative advantages while being outside of one or more of these groups can confer relative disadvantages. This can be illustrated with an analogy from gaming.

Imagine a basic game rule: to succeed at something (such as getting a job or hitting a monster with a sword), you need to roll a set number or higher on a die. This represents the role of chance in real life. In most games, you can get pluses and minuses to your roll, based on various factors. For example, if your character is related to the king, you might get a plus when rolling to talk the city guard out of arresting you for the bar fight. If your character belongs to an unpopular band of rebels, you might suffer a minus when rolling to convince the city guard to not attack you when they catch you speaking out against the king.

Looking at real life like a game, membership in one or more of these groups would confer a plus on some rolls and not being in these groups might confer a negative on some rolls. To address some more likely strawman attacks, I am not claiming that being in one of these groups always gives an advantage in every possible situation. Nor am I claiming that being outside of these groups always confers a disadvantage in every possible situation. My claim is that a person gains more advantages from being a member of these groups relative to other groups and this is consistent with cases where membership in one of these groups might not yield an advantage or even be a disadvantage. For example, a white male would be at a disadvantage when trying to secure a literary prize for minority female authors. But that same white male would often enjoy many advantages relative to minority women, such as how seriously their views are taken at work.  Pointing out a few examples in which white, straight, Christian men do not have an advantage (or might be at a disadvantage) does not refute the general claim that membership in these groups confers general advantages in the United States.

It is important to note that I am taking these advantages and disadvantages to be, as I have said, like pluses and minuses on random rolls rather than factors that always decide the outcome of events. As a made-up example, imagine that getting a good job requires rolling a 15+ using a 20-sided die. Imagine that for various reasons, such as bias, race and sex are factors that impact your chance of being hired. Put in made-up game terms, imagine that because of bias, being a man would give you a +1 on the roll and being white would also give +1 on the roll to get hired. A white man would make the roll with a +2, a black man would make it with a +1, a white woman would roll with +1, and a brown woman would make the roll at +0. Any one of them could succeed (0r fail) on the roll. But imagine hundreds, thousands or millions of people trying to get good jobs: even small relative advantages will have a significant impact on the overall results. If the relative advantages are larger, the impact will be even more significant and will result in a noticeable difference when large numbers of people are involved. This is what the United States looks like. As such, it makes sense to believe that membership in certain groups confers meaningful advantages in life. Again, these advantages do not guarantee success, nor do they utterly exclude others from succeeding they just rig the rolls, to go with the gaming analogy.

Interestingly, there are those who claim that the members of the above groups (straight, white, male, Christian) are the real victims today not the groups who are underrepresented in having power. I will turn to this subject in the next essay in this series.

While American mythology lauds fair competition and self-made heroes, our current system of inheritance creates unfair competition and being a self-made hero is all but impossible. One major part of the inheritance problem is the disparity it has created between white and black Americans. While most of those in positions to address this matter must be fine with it, if you believe in fair competition and equality of opportunity, then consistency requires that you also believe that this problem needs to be addressed.

Condensing history, white people have enjoyed numerous advantages gifted to them by the state. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided land that went mostly to white people. This land was acquired in large part, by the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Compensation was also paid to white slave owners after the civil war, but the infamous 40 acres and a mule remains an empty promise.  The 1935 Wagner Act gave unions the ability to engage in collective bargaining, and these unions were a great boon to white workers. But it permitted unions to exclude non-whites, which they usually did.

The Federal Housing Administration’s programs allowed millions of average white Americans to buy homes, while excluding black Americans. The national neighborhood appraisal system tied mortgage eligibility to race. Integrated communities were defined as being financial risk and ineligible for home loans, which is known as “redlining.” From 1934 to 1962, the government backed $120 billion in home loans with 98% going to whites. Even now, black and Latino mortgage applicants are still 60% more likely than whites to be rejected, controlling for factors other than race. One common response to such assertions is that while past racism was bad, the past is past. While this does have rhetorical appeal, it is fundamentally mistaken: the past influences and shapes the present. One obvious way this occurs is through inheritance: wealth accrued from slavery and from state handouts to white people have been passed down through the generations. This is not to deny obvious truths: some white people blow their inheritance, many white people are mired in poverty, and there are some rich black Americans. The problem is a general problem that is not disproved by individual exceptions.

Because of the policies and prejudices of the past, the average white family today has about eight times the assets of the average African American family. Even if families with the same current incomes are compared, white families have over double the wealth of Black families. A primary reason for this is inheritance.

Inheritance, obviously enough, enables a family to pass down wealth that can be used to provide competitive advantages. These can include funding for education and starting money for businesses. It also helps people endure difficult times, such as pandemics and recessions, better. As such, whites enjoy an unearned competitive advantage over blacks: they inherit an advantage. The advantage is also built on explicitly racist and discriminatory policies.

Some have called for reparations for past injustices and others vehemently oppose the idea. One stock objection is that reparations would take resources from living people to give them to other living people based on injustices committed by people who are long dead. While this objection can be countered, an easy way to get around it, and many others, is to adopt a plan focused on heavily taxing inheritance and using the revenue to directly counter past and present economic unfairness.

To win over consistent conservatives, the resources should be used to enhance the fair competition they claim to believe in. Examples of how the resources should be used include addressing funding inequities in education, addressing infrastructure inequities, and addressing disparities in mortgages. That is, providing people with a fair start so they compete in the free market alleged to be so beloved by conservatives.

When marketing the idea to conservatives, the emphasis should be on how people are now benefiting from what conservatives profess to loath: unearned handouts from the state and unfair advantages provided based on race given by the state. One can assume that people with such professed values will support this idea, otherwise one would suspect they are lying about their principles. The proposed plan would help remove unfair and unearned handouts to enable the competition to be reset. To use the obvious analogy, this would be like a sports official noticing athletes cheating and then responding by restoring fairness to the competition.

This proposal has many virtues including that it allows past economic injustices to be addressed in a painless manner: nothing will be taken away from any living person for what a dead person did. Rather, some people will receive less of an unearned gift. As such, they are not losing anything, they are simply getting less of something they do not deserve and did not earn. While some might claim this would hurt them, that would be an absurd response. It would be like getting a free cake and then being a little bitch because one did not get a thousand free cakes simply for being born.

As always, the devil is in the details. As noted in other essays, I am not proposing that inheritance be eliminated, nor am I arguing in favor of the state taking your grandma’s assault rifle collection and giving it to a poor family. The general idea is that inheritance should be taxed, and the tax rate should be the result of careful consideration of all the relevant factors, such as the average inheritance in the United States. The plan could also involve increasing the tax rate gradually over time, to reduce the “pain” and thus the fervor of the opposition. In any case, a rational and fair proposal would take considerable effort to design but would certainly be worth doing if we want to be serious when we speak of fairness and opportunity in the United States.

While my criticisms of inheritance might seem silly and, even worse, leftist, it is in perfect accord with professed American political philosophy and the foundation of capitalism. Our good dead friend Thomas Jefferson said, “A power to dispose of estates forever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.” The Moses of capitalism, Adam Smith, said that “There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death.” As such, opposition to inheritance is American, conservative, and capitalistic. But this provides no reason to accept my view. What I will advance in this essay is an argument by intuition against inheritance using a fictional town called “Inheritance.”

Imagine, you have been hired as an IT person for Heritage, a company in the town of Inheritance. You pack up your belongings and drive to the town. You spend the first week getting up to speed with the company and are not at all surprised when you find that the top officers of the company are all family members and that the current owner is the son of the previous owner. You are, however, surprised to find out that almost everyone else who works for the company inherited their job. You are one of the few exceptions because the previous IT person quit, and their daughter did not want to inherit the job. This strikes you as rather odd. But a job is a job, and you are happy to be employed.

You learn that the town has an upcoming founders’ day celebration, and you sign up for the 5K. You find it a bit odd that the race entry form asks you for your best inherited 5K time, but chalk that up to some fun with the town’s name. You run a 18:36 5K and the next closest person crosses the line at 26:22. Since an iPad Pro is the first-place prize, you eagerly head towards the race director when she starts announcing the overall winner. You are shocked when the winner is the mayor of the town, Lisa Heritage. She ran a 28:36 and so you beat her by 10 minutes. Her time is announced as 17:34, which you know is not true. Thinking this is all a joke, you ask what is going on. Realizing you are the new guy in town, they explain that the place in the race is determined by either the runner’s actual time or their best inherited time. The mayor’s mother, who was also mayor, was a good runner and her PR in college for the 5K was 17:34. Her daughter inherited the time and can use it for the race. A bit upset by all this; you make a bad joke about her running for office. The locals laugh and say that all political offices are inherited. There is only an election if no one who can inherit the office wants it. You hope this is all some sort of elaborate prank.

During the winter you get a sinus infection and go to the town doctor. Looking at the medical degree on the wall, you see it was from Ohio State and the graduation date is 1971. Expecting to see an older doctor, you are surprised to see someone in their early twenties. You ask them about medical school, and they say they inherited the degree and the office. Incredulous, you ask if they have any medical training at all. They indignantly inform you that they have been practicing medicine since they were 17, when they inherited the degree. Looking up your symptoms on Google, they prescribe some antibiotics and send you on your way. What a strange town, you think…but a job is a job and it is not like you inherited a fortune.

In making this appeal to intuition, I am assuming that while you probably accept the inheritance of wealth and property (including businesses), you probably do not believe that all jobs should be inherited. You also probably reject the idea that political offices, race times, and degrees should be inheritable. But allowing inheritance of property and wealth while rejecting the other sorts of inheritance seems inconsistent. This is clear when it comes to inheriting jobs: while people generally accept it when family members inherit positions in a company (such as being the owner), it would be odd for the other jobs to be inheritable. Having a hereditary IT department would, for example, be odd.  The challenge is defending one while rejecting the other; at least if one wants to hold onto inheritance. 

While families do pass on political influence (the Clintons and Bushes were good examples of this), most Americans reject the idea of inheriting political offices. We did, after all, have a revolution to be done with kings and queens. There are reasons for taking this view that are grounded in democratic values; but there is also the idea that inherited offices would lead to harm arising from the concentration of power and lack of accountability. There is also the fact that such positions would be unearned. While democratic values would not apply to inherited wealth and property directly, concerns about concentrated power and unfair advantages would still apply.

In the case of the 5K , the fictional mayor did not earn their victory. But the same also applies to inheriting ownership of the company. They did not earn their position; it was a matter of the chance of birth. The matter of inheriting degrees is also clear: a degree is supposed to reflect that a person has learned things and thus has knowledge and skills. While this is not always true, an inherited degree is utterly unearned and provides no skills or knowledge. Allowing people to inherit degrees, especially in fields like medicine and engineering, would be disastrous.

One way to reply would be to bite the bullet and accept inheritance broadly. After all, human history has centuries of examples of cultures in which wealth, property, offices, and other things were inherited. This would be a consistent position.

A better approach would be to try to break the analogies—to argue that inheriting wealth and property differs in relevant ways that would defend it from the absurdity of other inheritances. I will, obviously, leave that task to the defenders of inheritance and will certainly accept good arguments with plausible premises that support this view.

Back in the 1980s I played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. When you start out as a new character in the game you roll to see how much gold you get. You use that gold to buy your equipment, such as your sword and chain mail or mace and holy symbol. While the starting gold varies by character class, there were no differences in the economic classes of the characters. For example, all starting fighters rolled 5d4 and multiplied that roll by 10 to determine their gold.  For role-playing purposes, a player could make up their character’s background, including their social and economic class but it had no impact on their starting gold. D&D has largely stuck with this system and the Player’s Handbook does not have an economic class-based system of starting gold.

Like many other players, my AD&D  group experimented with adding economic classes: a player rolled on a table to determine their social and economic class. For example, a player character might be a peasant. The upper classes started with more gold and even some valuable items and some players even proposed allowing new characters to start out with magic items.

While initially popular, rolling for economic class did not last long. A player who rolled badly on the table could not afford even their basic gear while a player who rolled exceptionally well started off with an abundance of gold and gear. We did tinker a bit with the tables, but we quickly returned to the standard rules. People could still roll badly or well, but it lacked the extremes of an economic class table.

The main reason, obviously enough, for abandoning the economic class table was it ended up being unfair: while everyone did get to roll, the chart could put people at a disadvantage or grant an unfair advantage at the start of the campaign. And this was with a relatively moderate chart. Another DM I knew ran a campaign using a more extreme table; a player who rolled well could start out with a keep and henchmen. A player who rolled badly could start out as a peasant with but a few coppers and be unable to buy the gear they needed. The player who started with the keep was quite happy, the peasant player far less so.  But let us think a bit about using such tables.

Imagine you are playing in a D&D campaign that uses an economic class table based on the United States, with fantasy names in place of the modern economic class names. The DM is an economic nerd, so they work out the value of a gold piece relative to a dollar, work out the average wealth for each age group in each economic class, work out the percentage of the population in each group and so on.  From all this they create a chart that determines your character’s starting wealth based on what you inherit. As in the real world, what economic class you are born into is random. As such, you might roll well and start off with thousands of gold pieces. Or you might have a bad roll and start with a few copper pieces.

Imagine that you are playing a fighter and roll badly, starting with a few coins. You can buy a dagger, a shield and a sack and that is it. Another player, a magic user, rolls exceptionally well and starts with 70,000 gp. She can buy all the gear she needs and, if the DM allows, buy much more. Suppose that the other players start off with enough to buy basic gear. If the magic user is good aligned or understands the importance of having a properly equipped party, they will share their wealth. They might buy you a longsword, plate armor, and other gear so you can keep the monsters from killing them. If you are all working together and share your starting gold, then this is fine: an advantage for one party member is an advantage for all. But suppose your magic user is selfish and wants to keep all their starting wealth for themselves. While that could be a problem, if your party is still otherwise working together, this will not be too bad if you get your share of the XP and loot, you will eventually even things out.

But suppose the DM is running a campaign in which the players are competing. Rather than working together as a party, you are competing to kill monsters and loot dungeons. You set out with your dagger and shield and stab a few goblins. The magic user hires several NPCs to assist her, and they enable her to slaughter her way through a small dungeon, adding the treasure to her already considerable wealth. She hires more NPCs, gets better gear, and continues to tear her way through dungeon after dungeon. Meanwhile, you are still struggling. You eventually kill and loot enough goblins to buy a long sword and leather armor and move on to ambushing lone orcs. The magic user has moved on to slaughtering giants. Finally, you can take on a bugbear, as the magic user and her hired NPCs take down a blue dragon. The dragon hoard gives her even more wealth and power; she buys more magic items and hires more NPCS. When you are finally ready to face an ogre, she is smashing ancient red dragons and liches. She soon has a kingdom of her own and is about to start a war with another nation to gain even more wealth. The campaign comes to an end; she has won easily. The DM then announces a new campaign will start: your new character will be the child of your previous character, inheriting their meager wealth and starting the new campaign with that. The person who played the magic user starts out with her new character being a prince or princess, inheriting the wealth of the kingdom. Just imagine how that will go. The first campaign was extremely unfair, the second will take the unfairness to a new level.

As noted, in a cooperative D&D game, where everyone is working together and sharing resources for the good of the party, the starting advantage of one is an advantage for all. In a competitive game, a significant disparity in starting wealth provides an unearned and unfair advantage. Players in such a campaign would rightfully complain and insist on having a fair start. Otherwise, the game would be rigged in favor of the player who rolls the best at the start. The same is true of significant inheritance in the real world. A large inheritance provides a considerable unearned advantage.

It could be argued that a skilled player could overcome a bad starting roll, and an incompetent player could stupidly throw away their advantage. While this is true, the odds would be heavily against the bad roller and heavily in favor of the good roller. Just because a truly exceptional person with a bad start could beat a truly incompetent person with a vast lead hardly shows that the situation is fair. Now, someone might want to play the unfair game and might even get all the other players to accept it. But it would be absurd to say it is fair or that it allows for true competition. The same applies to the United States: we can accept an unfair system of inherited wealth, but we cannot claim that the game is fair or allows for true competition. Sure, some rise from humble origins and achieve fairy tale levels of success by going from peasant to a merchant prince. Some start with all the advantages and waste them, starting with silver spoons and ending up with plastic sporks. But most finish in accord with their start, the game playing out as one would expect. 

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.

As the COVID-19 pandemic played out, Trump wavered on social distancing. One reason was that billionaires  argued for getting back to work during the pandemic. In  neutral terms, their argument was that the harm of maintaining  social distance would exceed the harm caused by sending people back to work.  This is a classic utilitarian approach in that the right action is the one that creates the greatest good (or the least harm).  Lieutenant Governor  Dan Patrick  advanced a similar, but much harsher argument. On his view, the damage done to the economy by trying to protect people s far outweighs the harm done by putting people at risk. He went so far as to claim that he would be willing to die for the economy and seemed willing to sacrifice other seniors as well. While this was not a mainstream view, it got some traction on Fox News. While some billionaires and Patrick acknowledge a downside to their proposals, some claimed the deaths would be good, another plus rather than a minus.

While it is tempting to dismiss the billionaires as greedy sociopaths who would sacrifice others to add to their vast fortunes, they do raise a moral problem: to what extent should some people be sacrificed for the good of others? We allowed, and rightly praised, sacrifices by health care workers, grocery store workers and many others who risked themselves for others. As with the billionaires’ argument, this can be morally justified on utilitarian grounds: the few put themselves at risk for the good of the many. They kept the rest of us alive by taking care of us, ensuring food remained available and so on. It is inarguable that these sacrifices were good, essential and heroic. It is also inarguable that some of them died because they stayed at their posts and did what must be done to keep the rest of us and our civilization alive. For essential goods and services, the risk seemed morally acceptable; especially from the viewpoint of people who were not themselves in danger. But what about the broader economy?

The billionaires were correct that a badly damaged economy would harm workers. As evidence, consider what happened to workers during the depressions and recessions inflicted upon them in the past. Things were already bad for many before the pandemic and the economic damage made things worse. As such, there was certainly a good argument for getting the economy back on track as soon as possible. But did the utilitarian argument support the billionaires’ view?

When engaging in an honest utilitarian calculation of this sort, the three main factors are values, scope and facts. In the case of the facts, one must honestly consider the consequences.  The scope determines who counts when assessing the harms and benefits. The values determine how one weighs the facts, what is considered good and what is seen as bad. It is a fact that the social distancing practices did economic damage. Many people were unable to work, many businesses closed or operated at minimum levels and so on. It was also a fact that relaxed social distancing to get people back to work resulted in more infections which caused more suffering and death. The billionaires and those who disagree with them agreed on these facts; but they disagreed about matters of scope (who counts) and value (what counts more). The billionaires showed no concern for the well-being of workers and it would be absurd to think they suddenly started to care. As such, the scope of their concern was, at most, their economic class of billionaires. In terms of values, the billionaires value money, more so than the well-being of workers (otherwise they would provide better pay and benefits). As such, their argument made sense to them: relaxing the restrictions benefited them financially and the harm would, as always, be suffered by other people. Those who think that everyone counts and who value life and health over profits for billionaires saw the matter differently.

It could be objected that while the billionaires are interested in their profits, they are also correct that workers would have been hurt more by the ongoing economic damage. As such, it was right to relax the restrictions because it was also better for the workers.  There are two main replies to this argument. The first reply is to argue that the billionaires were wrong in their assessment: even in their economic terms, relaxing the restrictions caused more economic damage than keeping them in place. To use an analogy, imagine a business in a large building that is on fire. One could argue that having the fire trucks pump water into the building will do a lot of damage and that the fire should be allowed to burn out while employees continue to work. But this can be countered by pointing out that allowing the building to burn will do far more damage in the long term and kill more people.  As such, unless the goal is short-term profits and long-term disaster, then it would have been best to keep social distancing in place until it was medically unnecessary.

The second reply is that people suffered, as they have for a long time, because of the economic and social structures we have constructed. We had vast resources to mitigate the harm that was done—the problem is that these resources were (and are) hyper concentrated into the hands of a few and most people lacked the resources to endure the pandemic on their own (and many lacked the resources to endure “normal” life before the pandemic). The truth is that we could have gotten through the economic harm of the pandemic better if we had been more willing to share the resources and wealth that we all created. It was ironic that the billionaires had a fix on hand for many of the harms they predicted: the economic and social structures could have been radically changed for the good of us all, rather than focused on the good of the elites

The lesson I hope we learned here is that the sacrifices of those in essential areas, like those working to provide food and health care, are morally justified and laudable. Another lesson is that the sacrifices extracted from the many by the few to expand their wealth are neither justified nor laudable. What is perhaps more horrifying than the billionaires’ view that people should die for the economy is that they believe they can make such statements in public with impunity and without fear of consequences. I hope that more people will see this for what it is, and they will work to change the world. Unfortunately, many have chosen the side of the billionaires once again and now they openly rule the oligarchy of America.

When billionaires are criticized for their excess wealth, their defenders often point out that they are philanthropists. Bill Gates is famous for his foundation, Jeff Bezos has given millions to his charities, and the Koch brothers have spent lavishly on higher education and medical research.

One counter to this defense is that this philanthropy yields advantages ranging from tax breaks to buying influence. To use an Aristotelian criticism, if the billionaires are engaging in philanthropy to advance their own interests rather than being generous for generosity’s sake, then they are not acting from virtue and should not be praised. To use a non-billionaire example, if I volunteer with an environmental group because I want to impress the liberals, then I am not being virtuous. If I volunteer because I want to do good, then I would be virtuous. But not everyone embraces virtue ethics.

A utilitarian would not be concerned with the motives and character of billionaires and would focus on the consequences of their actions. So, if Bezos donates money to get a tax break or offset his negative image, that does not matter to the utilitarian. What matters is the effect of the donation in terms of generating happiness and unhappiness. As such, even if a billionaire should not be praised for their motives or character, they should be lauded if their donation does more good than the alternatives. While the motives and character of billionaires and the utilitarian value of philanthropy can be debated at length, I turn now to the claim that the rich give the most to charity.

When people say the rich give more to charity than the non-rich, this seems to be an obviously true claim. After all, the rich have more resources and can give more in total and as a percentage of their wealth than the poor without making a significant sacrifice. To use an analogy, suppose Sally Bigbucks, you, and I are at lunch. Poor Pete asks us for $10 so he can buy food for his family. I have $10, you have $20 in your pocket, and Sally has $10,000. If lunch is $10, I’d have to forgo lunch to help Pete, which would be a real sacrifice. You could give 50% of what you have and still buy lunch, which would also be a meaningful sacrifice. Sally could generously give Pete $100, but this would only be 1% of what she has on hand and would not be a sacrifice. If she only gave him $10, that would be 0.1% of what she has on hand. The same sort of calculation should be made when the rich give what seem like large amounts of money to charity. To put these donations in perspective, you should determine what percentage the donation would be in terms of their yearly income or total wealth. So, while a wealthy person might publicly and loudly donate thousands of dollars to a charity, it might be comparable to you or I donating tens of dollars. This is not to attack the rich for donating to charity; it is better that they do this than, for example, buying a $900,000 watch. But we should keep the extent of their generosity in perspective: they can give more because they have far more than the rest of us.

Another point is that the rich can only be charitable because other people are in need. On the one hand, this can be dismissed as a an obvious “duh”: charity is only needed because there are poor people in need. If everyone was well off, there would be no need for charity.  On the other hand, this is an important and we need to understand why the rich are so rich and others are so poor they need charity. With the vast wealth of the United States, why do so many people need the largess of the wealthy and the support of taxpayers just to survive?

The American right tends to explain this by claiming the rich earn their wealth and those in need of charity are defective or have been the victim of a disaster.  For example, the poor are lazy or less intelligent. Racism often factors in here as well. As such, the rich are generously giving what they have rightfully earned to the unworthy or incapable. Using a Thanksgiving analogy, Grandma Sally bought a turkey feast that she graciously shares with others, despite the fact they contributed little or nothing. Perhaps because they were victims of a disaster or perhaps because they are too lazy or stupid to afford their own feast.

The left often claims the rich get their wealth by using unfair advantages and exploiting others. On this view, there are many people who need charity because the rich have taken most of the wealth. As such, when the rich engage in charity they give back to the poor some of what they took away. To use a Thanksgiving analogy, Grandma Sally has a great feast in which everyone works hard to make the feast, but Grandma doles out a few tiny bits of food to the folks at the little table.

While the left and right will endlessly debate this, charity is needed because there are people who cannot meet their needs by their own efforts, usually because of low wages and high costs. This is the system that exists, and it creates both those in need of charity and those who have so much that they can engage in philanthropy and remain extremely wealthy. As such, while philanthropy is better than nothing, it is the result of an evil system, one so imbalanced that some people require charity despite working hard.

Naturally one could advance the usual counter that those who get charity are somehow defective, such as lazy and unwilling to find good jobs. But this goes against the facts: people need charity because we have created and tolerate a system that takes so much from so many that some depend on the wealthy giving a tiny back from what they have taken. This is not worthy of praise.