Paul Knight 🔰

I see Inheritance Tax is back in the news today. People need to understand that these arguments will not be resolved without addressing the elephant in the room: land. Landed property is the biggest part of most estates, and the one that tugs at the heartstrings hardest. However, a house is not just the building that someone paid to put up, but additionally- a monopoly claim on a site whose value is created by everyone else (the nearby station, the good school, the planning system- and ultimately the fact that the state will defend the title). We treat those as one family heirloom, yet they are in different moral categories. Leave people free to pass on what they made, but not the claim on the national commons. Even if the only asset involved is the house that looks, to many families, like their children’s last way onto the ladder- over time this will create a hereditary landed class at the expense of the wider nation. The decent settlement is to collect the land’s publicly created value as it accrues, and stop using death as the moment we finally notice the problem.