comment: >
context: Inheritance doesn't imply I deserve anything from my parents, it implies my parents have the right to do what they want with their money including but not limited to giving it to me. >
  
  
  Inheritance doesn't imply I deserve anything from my parents, it implies my parents have the right to do what they want with their money including but not limited to giving it to me.
  
  When I mention inheritance, I’m talking about it from the perspective of the person who receives it, he or she should be rejecting it if they are morally consistent with the “past is the past” or “why should I have to pay for crimes that people before me committed?” Rhetoric. >
  
  People generally are not opposed to voluntary donations.  "Why should I have to pay?" and "What is wrong with me deciding to pay?" are differnt questions. >
  
  
  If I shouldn’t bare the sins of my father, why should I bare his fruits?
  
  This is like saying “if I don’t drink poison, why should I drink water?”
  You drink it because it’s good for you, and you make the choice to accept things that are good for you.
  There are many reasons to be for or against reparations. There are also many reasons to be for or against inheritance of wealth. They are not, however, related.
  In an inheritance, the wealth is usually transferred between people in the same family, who know each other, and who both want the wealth transfer to take place. That is not the case for reparations.
  Again, anyone can be for or against either of them, but there is no reason to say that if you are against one, you have to be against the other. >
  
  
  This is like saying “if I don’t drink poison, why should I drink water?” You drink it because it’s good for you, and you make the choice to accept things that are good for you.
  
  Yes. I know human being are mostly opportunistic and would do what best for them. I spoke about that in the post, I’m pointing out the moral inconsistency here. Most people would make the moral argument that I shouldn’t bare the consequences of my fathers actions when those lead to negative things like debt, bondage or worse but wouldn’t make the same argument when the consequences of their fathers actions lead to wealth, power or better.
  
  There are many reasons to be for or against reparations. There are also many reasons to be for or against inheritance of wealth. They are not, however, related. In an inheritance, the wealth is usually transferred between people in the same family, who know each other, and who both want the wealth transfer to take place. That is not the case for reparations. Again, anyone can be for or against either of them, but there is no reason to say that if you are against one, you have to be against the other.
  
  They aren’t directly related no. But I’m pointing out the moral inconsistency in regards to those to topics that I seem to hear a lot, people would detach themselves from others if they commit bad acts, however would have no problem reattaching themselves to the gains of those bad acts. >
  
  The moral justifications are completely different. For reservations, the justification is that your ancestors were wronged, so the state should pay you. For inheritance, the justification is that the deceased left instructions of what to do with their belongings. >
  
  Reparations are implemented at the level of the collective. It is the socialization of past wrongs, and that is morally unjustified as not all members of the collective necessarily benefited in the past. The descendants of the victims do not have the right to anything from those who didn't benefit from the victimization.
  Inheritance is implemented at the level of the individual. The same logic used above applies here as well. Unless you can attach the original wrongdoing to the individual himself, no third party has any right to anything belonging to the individual.
  In both cases, consent can overcome the obstacle. Someone whose ancestors didn't benefit can consent to reparations, and someone can choose to pass the inheritance to someone.
  If your father truly sinned and you benefited, then you are obliged bear his sins. That's practically non-existent outside of a few case (eg. British monarchy) though. >
  
  
  why should I bare his fruits?
  
  Because he chose to give you his fruits >
  
  I deliberately mentioned from the “side of the recipient”, the recipient should take the initiative to reject it if they are morally consistent with the “past is the past” principle. >
  
  It has nothing to do with the past being the past. It has to do with punishing people for things they didn't do. If people choose to give others money as reparations, that's perfectly OK. What isn't OK is the government stealing money from people to provide reparations. >
  
  
  punishing people for things they didn't do
  
  Except that if someone steals a bunch of money, and then spends it on their family, the stuff bought with the stolen money is taken away. >
  
  Should that really be considere a punishment? >
  
  You're looking at reparations through a very one-dimensional lens: X people have wealth at the expense of Y people, therefore X people owe Y people something back.
  But reparations in real life is more like: X people had wealth at one time, maybe not anymore, at the expense of Y people. Therefore A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, and X people need to make reparations to Y people and everyone who looks slightly like them regardless of actual historical subjugation or not.
  The main argument against reparations isn't that one group didn't benefit from the subjugation of another. It's that people are made to pay for crimes they didn't commit, and didn't even benefit from, to some other group, even though many members of that group have very tenuous connection to the actual victims of those crimes.
  Inheritance does not have a parallel to the reality of reparations. You are comparing your mental model of how reparations work in a perfect world, to how inheritance works in our existing world. You're comparing an abstract idea to a real practice. This is illogical. >
  
  
  But reparations in real life is more like: X people had wealth at one time, maybe not anymore, at the expense of Y people. Therefore A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, and X people need to make reparations to Y people
  
  This isn't the dominant model of reparations most people are asking for. In the most common model I've seen, X is "the US government" and Y is "Black Americans." The US government was responsible for the extraction of wealth from Black Americans, resulting in an inequality of wealth (between the average Black American and the average American) that persists to this day. Therefore, the US government is asked to make reparations to Black Americans, so as to make them whole by dissolving the socioeconomic gaps that still exist. There's no alphabet of third parties who are being asked to make reparations here. >
  
  Assuming you’re a US citizen then the “US government” is you. >
  
  What? That seems obviously false: most citizens do not hold governmental office, and even those who do are not themselves the government. The government is a legal entity independent of any of its officers and employees. >
  
  
  most citizens do not hold governmental office,
  
  But they do pay taxes, which are what is being proposed to be used for these payments >
  
  Who is proposing to use a tax on all US citizens (or even most US citizens) to pay directly for reparations? I don't think I've seen any proposals like that. >
  
  Where else could the money come from? >
  
  From the government. >
  
  And where does the government get it's money? >
  
  The US Mint and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. >
  
  People work their ass off for their children. Therefore it is their $ to some degree. It wouldn't exist without them. 
  It's a good incentive. You need incentives to have a productive society. >
  
  Practically, makes sense. I’m making a moral argument. >
  
  Morally the argument is. People should be able to do whatever they want with the $ they earn. Why should they not be able to give it to their kids? It's not practical. Much like you correctly pointed out reparations are not practical.
  So inheritance is impractical to remove. Reparations is impractical to execute. They are polar opposites in that regard. >
  
  
  If I shouldn’t bare the sins of my father, why should I bare his fruits?
  
  Racial-based reparations aren't about the sins of anyone's father, they're about the sins of people unrelated to people who are simply classified in the same “race” in notoriously nonsensical U.S.A. race classification schemes.
  Most “African-Americans” as they call it in the U.S.A. are at least 50% indigenously European and have the blood of slave owners. In fact, since slave owners were only an elite wealthy minority that often raped slaves, it's very likely that the average “African-American” has more slave owner blood than the average “European-American” in the U.S.A.
  It's not about ancestry, which would be dubious enough.
  That being said, I think inheritance should not exist, giving people something for free should not be allowed, and that all children should be raised in centralized government child-raring facilities rather than by actual parents exactly because I don't believe in the advantage people get depending on how wealthy their parents are. >
  
  Im assuming you're talking about giving mobey to black americans for slavery which if thats the case then Im just gonna say willing passing down money to family is not the same as making it an obligation to give my money away to someone for something that I didn't do. >
  
  
  As far as I’m concerned inheritance from the side of the recipient is just one big welfare check, probably even better.
  
  But pretty clearly from the side of the decedent, they're giving their stuff to a person because the want to. 
  
  I just think there’s a moral inconsistency that’s all, everybody would passionately oppose to paying off the debts of people before them yet would unregretfully accept their gains, if your view of the world is as contaminated as mine then in a way it’s an implicit celebration of the past.
  
  The difference is that one of these situations involves the government extracting money through taxation backed by the threat of violence to pay people, or sometimes the descendants of people or people who look like people, that were wronged and the other involves someone voluntarily disbursing their estate and moveable property after they die.   
  
  America makes for an easy case study. There was a lot of bloodshed and mistreatment in history and even abroad today to sustain a society with an abundance of wealth and more. 
  
  There were also a lot of people who worked hard and created a tremendous amount of value for others and then chose to leave their wealth to others after they died. 
  
  Everybody is happy to reap the rewards of that, but the second it’s implied that there should be compensation for those wrongs
  
  Because being punished for something you didn't do is wrong. 
  
  Can my dad steal all your dads wealth, I inherit that wealth, you ask for some, would it then be fair for me to say that the past is the past and it’s not my responsibility to give you money?
  
  Based on the statute of limitations for theft, ya probably. 
  But it's a bad metaphor, everyone who lives in America benefits tremendously from the work of Americans who came before, but that doesn't mean they owe anything to the ancestors of those people or people who look like those people. 
  
  Money is a store of value, the exploitation of American slaves for example created wealth that hasn’t disappeared and has likely trickled down through generations.
  
  Indeed. 
  
  Money is a means of exchange, I can exchange the value of labour that has been done over a hundreds of years ago for some today (likely not the same amount)
  
  Indeed. 
  
  If we truly should be disconnected from the decisions made by those before us, shouldn’t we just all start from 0?
  
  We're not disconnected from the decisions of those before us, but we aren't at fault for their bad decisions. 
  
  If I shouldn’t bare the sins of my father, why should I bare his fruits?
  
  Because he wanted to give them to you. >
  
  
  If we truly should be disconnected from the decisions made by those before us, shouldn’t we just all start from 0? 
  
  Yes but the solution to that is not abolishing inheritance but having a system where we don't depend on inherited money to make money ourselves. >
  
  Inheritance is good primary from the perspective of the one giving them
  If I earn money and make something out of my life it would be incredibly disheartening and cheapening if when I die it just disappears and I didn’t have the opportunity to pass it on to my kids who I care about
  Yeah it’s a welfare check for there kids but ultimately it’s not for them in a moral sense it’s for the parents
  Reparations also don’t make any sense due to the impracticality of who deserves reparations and who deeevred to pay them 
  In inherentence the person who pays it does so by free will as a gift out of the funds they earned in there life to someone of there choosing
  In repressions it’s someone who’s it’s taken by force to give to someone who they don’t know or choose >
  
  
  “Practically its a non starter for many reasons”
  
  You don’t have to lie and say there is more than one reason. You don’t dig the idea of reparations because you will most likely not receive anything from them. Lets just be honest here. >
  
  I’m from the UK, live in the UK. Ad Hom was unsuccessful. Next. >
  
  Bahahaha ya’ll are even worse than us. Are you kidding? The reason reparations scare ya’ll is because you would owe them to half the world. Who said brits aren’t funny? >
  
  
  As far as I’m concerned inheritance from the side of the recipient is just one big welfare check, probably even better.
  
  Inheritance is in no way comparable to welfare. Welfare is a government fulfilling it's duty to protect it's people. Inheritance is an individual deciding what will happen to the resources they control after they are no longer around to control them. 
  
  everybody would passionately oppose to paying off the debts of people before them yet would unregretfully accept their gains
  
  It is totally possible to inherit debt. While people aren't happy about it, they allow it, but paying reparations is not paying off the debts of the people before you. The people who were actually owed the reparations money are long dead, along with the people who owed it to them. There is simply no reasonable way to figure out who owes who money at this point, and blanket rulings would be unreasonable to the point where the people who they think should recieve reparations could end up paying them. For example, I am visibly white and so are my parents, but looking back in my family tree reveals that my ancestors were enslaved more recently and in greater proportions than any black person I've met who had similar knowledge of their own family tree. What about the massive numbers of immigrants who arrived after emancipation and their decendants?
  
  if your view of the world is as contaminated as mine then in a way it’s an implicit celebration of the past.
  
  How is doing what you can to ensure the future wellbeing of your descendants/hiers/followers a celebration of the past?
  
  Removing all the nuance: Can my dad steal all your dads wealth, I inherit that wealth, you ask for some, would it then be fair for me to say that the past is the past and it’s not my responsibility to give you money?
  
  Well for one, you wouldn't inherit that money in most cases. In most cases, your father would be arrested and go to jail and the money would be returned to my father, or me if he has died. In the real world you will never touch a dime of that money, and if you did, you'd probably go to jail too.
  A better example would be to say one of my 40 great-great-great-grandparents probably exploited your ancestors for money. In the couple hundred years since, my family has lost most, if not all, of that money, and married immigrants who's families never had a thing to do with slavery. Is it fair to say the past is the past and that it's not my responsibility to pay you anything?
  
  I can exchange the value of labour that has been done over a hundreds of years ago for some today
  
  No you can't. Not if we are still referring to American slavery, at least. The majority of wealth held by slave owners was lost at the end of the Civil War. It hasn't been sitting in some bank account getting passed down from parent to child for hundreds of years. 
  
  If we truly should be disconnected from the decisions made by those before us, shouldn’t we just all start from 0?
  
  We are mortal. Every single one of us is going to die some day. One of our primary biological motivations is to have children and ensure their success. Why work for anything more than the bare minimum you need to survive if you cannot pass what you've earned on to your children? >
  
  The difference is that inheritance is built into the social contract we all signed. That's partly why people agreed to this social contract in the first place. Without the contract, rape/murder/genocide is completely acceptable just like it is in the animal kingdom. There are no rules because no rules have been written down. In fact, most religions say that there are no natural rules of God. They didn't exist until God, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, etc. came down and told us what to do and not do.
  In this way, it was totally fine for you to kill your brother, your village to kill the next village over, etc. We're at the point where it's generally ok for one country to kill people in another country. So if you are a US citizen and are bound by the laws of the US, you can't kill another US citizen. But if there is no US and you're only bound by the complete lack of natural laws, it's fine to murder anyone you like. That's what European colonists did to people all around the world. Everyone was operating under the rules of kill or be killed, and those colonists happened to win. 
  Then everyone agreed to terms where you won't kill each other and agreed to face certain consequences. For example, if you kill someone today, their family isn't responsible for punishing you, all 330 million Americans are responsible for punishing you. That's why cases are United States v. the killer, not X family vs. the killer.
  In this way, we now have a contract where you get certain things (e.g., civil liberties, property rights, inheritance rights, government benefits) and you owe certain things (e.g., taxes). You have rules to follow (e.g., no murder) and ways to change/write those rules (e.g., voting, running for office). And there are clear enforcement mechanisms. If someone violates the rules, you are responsible to help punish the violator. Most people choose to simply pay taxes to a police department to handle that stuff, but that's ultimately the deal. If you refuse to agree to this social contract, that's fine. But then we go back to the world where there is no social contract where anyone can just kill anyone else. Then it's 330 million vs. 1, and the group of 330 million will just fine, imprison, or kill you.
  Ultimately, colonists committed genocide. But there was no social contract against genocide. So there is no compensation for it in the form of reparations. Then there was a social contract written down and agreed to by a large number of people banning genocide against people who have agreed to the social contract. That social contract includes inheritance.
  We could change the social contract to allow killing people. We could decide to pay reparations anyways. We could ban inheritance. Social contracts, governments, taxes, laws, etc. are all arbitrary. They were invented by humans. We can do whatever we want. At the end of the day, we need to come up with terms that maximize our individual lives. If something help you, work to change the government/rules to benefit you. If something hurts you, work to change the social contract to get rid of that. Everyone is optimizing for their own rational self-interest. In the case of reparations, maybe that's the price of getting more people to join the social contract and reducing the risk of violence. The US and Europe can simply pay people in Asia, Africa, and South America to agree to their social contract. Because as it stands, India and China are rising nuclear armed superpowers that have every right to be angry at Europe and the US and who never agreed to the terms that violence is wrong. For them, it's still a game of tit for tat/kill or be killed. And right now, the US and Europe had the last tit. From their perspective, it's their turn to tat. If the US and Europe want to avoid war in the future, the best move might be to pay reparations now and get the former slave countries to feel like things are even. Otherwise, they're going to attack back.
  But this isn't reparations. This is a proactive investment to reduce the risk of being attacked in the future. The same thing applies to the US's treatment of Native Americans, slaves, Asian rail workers, Japanese families in internment camps, etc. The people who were so poorly mistreated by white conservative Christian heterosexual men are now becoming powerful enough to fight back and they are angry. Reparations are a way to proactively palliate them.
  This logic goes back to WWI. England, France, etc. beat Germany and they punished the hell out of them. They stuck them with a ton of debt, and minimal opportunities. Suffering Germans decided to follow Hitler and started a new war. After WWII, the US, England, France, etc. realized their mistake and spent a ton of money rebuilding Germany and Japan and supporting their people. (More importantly, they wanted to counter the increasingly powerful USSR.) Now Germany and Japan are the US's closest allies.
  In my model, you don't give reparations to the people you killed because you feel bad. You invest in building them up because they are becoming increasingly powerful and want revenge. This works really well in capitalism because it's an economic system where you can own stock in other people's companies. So when they do well, you do well. Inheritance is part of this because you know that any money you spend in helping your enemies today will benefit your children tomorrow. Not in some indirect "karma" way, but in a direct way where your share of the profits will instantly move into your kid's bank accounts and anyone who tries to steal money will be killed.
  I think this gives you a cynical, but honest view of how things work in the real world. If you understand the rules of the game better, you can play it better too. >
  
  If I leave a friend, or my spouse an inheritance, do you think there's a moral inconsistency there if they accept it?
  If no, why does the fact it's a parent or other family member magically make it a moral inconsistency?
  If yes, if I just straight up give someone money, while I'm alive, not as an inheritance, but as a gift, do you think there's a moral inconsistency there if they accept it?
  If no, why does the fact I died magically make it a moral inconsistency?
  If yes, what if I leave a tip at a restaurant? I didn't need to give that money, I chose to. It's a gift. Is the waiter/waitress who accepts it, but who doesn't agree with reparations, being morally inconsistent?
  Your money is your money. You can do what you want with it. Inheritance is consent-based. Nevermind the fact it's usually given to family or people who played a huge role in the deceased's life; given to somebody who you had responsibilities to, or were grateful to. There's absolutely no moral inconsistency, and it's honestly a bit weird to compare somebody willingly giving their own money to somebody in their lives to the state forcefully taking money from people who may or may not have had anything to do with, or any benefit from, something which happened before anyone alive today was born, and giving it to people who may or may not have had anything to do with, or any disadvantage due to, that thing.
  Nevermind the fact that when you do it on such a broad, stupid characteristic such as race, you could literally take money from the descendent of a slave and give it to the descendent of a slave owner as 'reparations for slavery'.
  There's no moral inconsistency, and the two concepts are completely unrelated.
  'Sins of the father' doesn't apply because when people talk about reparations, they are talking in much broader terms, almost always entirely race-based. If you were to go on an individual case-by-case basis, work out in a fool-proof manner who directly benefitted from slavery, by how much, and who was disadvantaged by slavery, by how much, and pay reparations in a manner which won't cause any real harm to the lives of the people you're taking money from, that would be something different entirely, and far more people would support it. But that's pretty much impossible, and not what 'reparations', in reality, mean. >
  
  See if I'm understanding this correctly. You're saying that if somebody believes reparations are bad because the past is the past and they shouldn't have to pay money for something they didn't do, then they shouldn't be accepting money that they themselves didn't earn? 
  It's an interesting view, but I would say that many individuals tend to view things in terms of family, esp. immediate family. So from their perspective, the money that is being passed down to them is their parents' hard earned money. Since their parents never owned slaves, the same does not apply where sin is concerned. Their immediate family worked hard and earned money, their immediate family did not sin. 
  If I were against reparations (which is not necessarily the case) I would say inheritance is my immediate family's hard earned sin free money whereas reparations are the government's money, taken from taxpayers. 
  Did I earn it myself? No. But my immediate family did. >
  
  It's perfectly consistent to be opposed to reparations while supporting inheritance, if you come from a position of being in favor of sustaining systematic racial inequity. Reparations would act to dissolve systemic socioeconomic racial inequity, so of course someone who supports sustaining racial inequality would oppose them. Conversely, inheritance is one of the most powerful and effective tools we have in society for propagating racial hierarchy, so of course someone who supports racial inequality would support inheritance. >
  
  Welcome to the far left! everyone gets a  equal start, everyone runs their race and ends in the same  place. Only your choices along the way matter.
  Edit: i know this doesn't look like i counter your arguments, but they look like strawmen, and i want to convince you that the world you hypothesized is actually better than the one you live in. >
  
  
  Welcome to the far left! everyone gets a equal start
  
  Got any examples of this happening in real life? Because everywhere this 'equal start' thing is tried I see it devolves into a hierarchy consisting of party members, those in government, and those in big cities, people in important industries and then everyone else in that order?
  If I can't leave anything to my kids I don't have an incentive to work hard or save money when I get older.