The Price of Inheritance

An essay on justice, responsibility, and the redistribution of the future

Inheritance tax is perhaps the most emotionally charged form of taxation we know.
The very mention of it makes many people bristle. It provokes a deep, instinctive sense of injustice — as if the state were interfering with something sacred: family, memory, the tangible result of a lifetime of work. And yet this is precisely what makes the debate so fundamental. Inheritance tax is not about confiscating what one has earned; it is about asking who benefits from what has been collectively created.

An inheritance may appear to be a private matter, but in truth it reflects the structure of society itself. Wealth is never purely the product of individual effort. It emerges within a world of infrastructure, education, healthcare, and public safety — all collective foundations. And yet, many treat their inheritance as something self-contained, as if it stood apart from the very society that made it possible. Inheritance tax forces us to confront that illusion. It asks us to recognise that wealth is not merely possession, but also a form of responsibility.

The human reflex: property, family, and fear

Inheritance tax touches something deeper than money — it touches our sense of continuity.
The family home, the savings account, the photographs on the mantelpiece: these are more than assets; they are carriers of identity. When the state claims a portion of them, it feels as though it intrudes on the private realm of memory. That is why resistance to inheritance tax is rarely economic — it is existential.

In his Discourse on Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine,’ was the true founder of civil society.” Possession, in other words, is not natural — it is social. Property exists only because others agree to respect it. This is the hidden truth that inheritance tax exposes: that ownership depends not on isolation, but on collective recognition.

Fear of inheritance tax, then, is not merely fear of losing money; it is fear of losing the illusion that ownership is absolute. For the middle class, an inheritance often represents the last remnant of security, the one opportunity for social stability. A just tax system should honour that feeling — not to entrench privilege, but to prevent it from turning into hereditary inequality.

The social reality: inequality by birth

Viewed more coldly, inheritance tax is one of the few mechanisms capable of confronting inherited inequality.
Those who inherit wealth begin life with advantages unrelated to effort or merit; those who do not inherit begin with a deficit they may never overcome. In today’s world of surging property prices and capital returns, wealth increasingly reproduces itself by lineage, not by labour.

The philosopher John Rawls called this the difference principle: inequality is only justifiable when it benefits the least advantaged. Inheritance tax is its fiscal embodiment. It does not aim to make everyone equal, but to keep inequality from fossilising into destiny.

Economist Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, demonstrated empirically that capital tends to grow faster than wages. Without redistribution, wealth becomes hereditary — not as a reward, but as a birthright. In this light, inheritance tax is not an act of envy but of democratic self-preservation.

Even Aristotle, writing in a world of landowners and households, drew a moral distinction between oikos (the household) and polis (the community). Wealth, he argued, finds its meaning only within the ethical order of the whole. Inheritance tax, seen thus, is not about punishment, but about restoring proportion — ensuring that personal fortune remains bound to civic responsibility.

A fairer model: continuity without accumulation

The challenge, then, is to link justice with empathy.
People must feel that the system works for them, not against them. That is why I propose a model based on simplicity, reason, and moral balance:

• 0% inheritance tax up to €500,000 per heir

• 30% between €500,000 and €1,000,000

• 50% on everything above €1,000,000

With a crucial addition: the family home is exempt if the heir actually moves into it and does not already own a property.

Such a design protects the middle class, preserves family homes, and ensures that the greatest fortunes contribute proportionally more. The psychological effect is crucial: most people perceive €500,000 as fair — generous enough to protect continuity, firm enough to prevent excess.

Economically, this reform would roughly double the current revenue from inheritance tax, from about €1.6 to €3.5 billion per year. Yet the deeper significance lies not in revenue, but in message: that society does not punish ownership, but calls for measure and responsibility.

This echoes Aristotle’s ethics of virtue: justice is not sameness, but the right balance between too much and too little. A reformed inheritance tax, understood rightly, is a form of moral moderation — a harmony between private right and public good.

The moral horizon: from “I” to “we”

Modern society, as Hegel observed, is shaped by the “bourgeois self” — a self that defines freedom as independence. Inheritance tax reminds us that true freedom exists within interdependence. Our prosperity is not self-made; it is relational.

In that sense, inheritance tax is as much symbolic as it is fiscal. It reawakens the idea that property is a relationship, not a wall. The Dutch philosopher B.M. de Gaay Fortman once called justice “the institutional form of compassion.” A society willing to tax what was not self-earned demonstrates exactly that kind of compassion — not as sentiment, but as structure.

When property is viewed only as a right and no longer as a responsibility, freedom decays into privilege. Inheritance tax, especially when reformed along fairer lines, offers a path back. It does not say, “The state takes from you,” but rather, “You return a portion to the community that made your wealth possible.”

Epilogue – The inheritance of responsibility

Whoever inherits receives more than assets. They inherit a story — of parents, of labour, of society. The question is not whether we wish to preserve that story, but how.
A just inheritance tax does not attack the family; it reaffirms what family truly means: the transmission of care, not of inequality.

As Hannah Arendt wrote, freedom is not the absence of constraint, but the capacity to begin anew.
A society that understands inheritance tax as a beginning rather than an end — as an investment in future equilibrium — chooses a mature form of freedom.

The true price of inheritance is not what we lose,
but what we are willing to share.