Summary Of The Article 'Is Inheritance Justified?'

In the article “Is Inheritance Justified?”, D.W. Haslett argues that not only is inheritance not essential to capitalism but rather that inheritance is actually counterintuitive to capitalism. Haslett argues that three of the main capitalistic ideals; “distribution according to productivity”, “equal opportunity” and “freedom” directly contradict inheritance and he goes on to present a proposal that would abolish inheritance. I intend to argue that inheritance is in fact aligned with capitalism and will provide further evidence by calling to attention how Haslett’s plan to end inheritance would directly conflict with capitalism. I will start by highlighting how inheritance is supported by the first two ideals Haslett mentions as the two are …show more content…
He starts by interpreting it in the narrow sense, the idea that capitalism means freedom to conduct transactions free of coercion, whether that be from the government or other humans. Which he believes inheritance is not inconsistent with it however nor is the abolishment of inheritance. However in the broad sense he feels that the abolishment of inheritance would be aligned with capitalism, as by better distributing the wealth of the general population you are giving rise to more overall freedom. While inheritance is not relevant to the first definition of freedom, I feel that it is actually necessary to capitalism when looking at freedom in the broad sense. Firstly, capitalism is founded on the belief that people will pursue their own self-interest and in doing so, in a free market, they will help society. Distributing wealth and abolishing inheritance would take away from freedom in the sense that one should be able to decide what they do with the fruits of their …show more content…
The idea of banning large gifts means limiting what people can do with their wealth, which means they are not pursuing their self-interest which is necessary to the idea of capitalism. Even Haslett acknowledges the people need to be enticed to produce. The second point of having the government sell property of the diseased to the highest bidder, and giving the government a year to do so, introduces coercion to the market place that would not otherwise be there if the beneficiary of the property was selling it or keeping it for themselves. Lastly is the point of leaving dependents only enough to meet their basic needs, which has one large problem best demonstrated by an example. If you have one child, who has two parents that work very hard to provide for him, the child is now able to live a rather comfortable life. Now by Haslett’s proposal, if the child was orphaned not only would the child be without his parents but he would also only be left with only enough to pay for his necessities. This not only takes away from the freedom of the parents to provide for their child, but also from the freedom the child would otherwise have with the inheritance. Inheritance plays a pivotal role in the idea of capitalism. The absence of it works against the idea of working with self-interest which is key to capitalism. Haslett’s arguments that it works against the ideals of “equal opportunity” and “freedom”