All inheritances converted to money and given to the state (and therefore lower/no taxes). Think of it as a thought experiment, I have no idea if it would work.

Some results might be:

- other taxes would be lower or zero
- more importance on spiritual and emotional values, less on material values
- education would become more important
- chances of succes more equal between people
- less chance of power monopolies
- less spoilt brats

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result would be, that people transfer ownership of much of their belongings to their children or younger relatives before they die, there may even be a huge potential for fraud when a transfer-of-ownership-document is dated back by cooperative family-lawyers to the day just before the persons death. it would require an enormous beaurocracy to accurately estimate and find everything of the dead persons wealth and people would try to cheat left and right.

in final consequence people would buy gold or other valuables and hide it somewhere and leave their loved ones with a treasure-map.

such a system like this would not work!

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@genius
There are fraud problems with any tax system. I guess gifts like that would have to be illegal. They could pull resources from the current tax system.

But apart from current feasability (it would ptobably not be easy to implement), would this be a good thing or a bad thing for a western democratic society?

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but...Paris Hilton will be broke...

In a manner of democratically speaking, this issue is a huge one.
Too huge to be addressed now.
What keeps me impressed is that democratic people have somehow stopped their minds in the late eighteenth century. Great democratic thinkers spent time to examine that issue though. Interesting though...

then you're a communist :what:

Not in the least, actually in a sense the current system is more communist. Under communism you more or less get your stuff for free and therefore nobody works hard. With this system everyone who wants to achieve something has to do it him/herself, you dont get any presents from parents etc.

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Ummm actually communists believe that communism was the way of achieving what you are talking about: that is individualism.

No, but freedom yes, problem was it took away almost all motivation, because there was no tangible reward.

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