The thing is that the wealth that you inherent doesn’t have to come from victimizing others. I live in NL, we had a lot of slavery and the VOC became very rich ofof it. But most Dutch people aren’t decended from anybody who profitted from the slavery that happend.
At the same time a lot of these massive companies from back in the day had a lot of funds go to the government or indirectly to the public in some other way.
If the money can be traced back to slavery or whatever victimizing then yes tax it a lot (without the descendants getting into actual financial trouble because of it)
I agree btw, the angelo-saxton way of thinking is why they got to wealthy over the back of others. That’s part of the reason the climate for workers is better in western Europe (NL, DE, DK, etc)
Ps. I always wonder what actually happend with the VOC money since if you calculate the value of the money to todays value it would have been one of the biggest companies in the world (top 3 or something). Like we are rich, but not THAT rich.
My point is exactly that you should only go after wealth inherited from people who made that wealth by victimizing others, not from people who just happenned to be living in the same country or sharing the same race as the oppressors, even with claims that “they did nothing to stop it” (as if one’s peasant ancestors during the age of absolute monarchy were even aware of Slavery much less had the means to stop it).
The whole point of the “it’s the fault of race/nationality” crowd is exactly to steer people away from following the “who still now gains from it” link, by in practice chosing an interpretation of the blame for what happenned that turns the descendants of some victims of the oppressors the ones supposed to pay compensation to the descendants of other victims of the oppressors (often the very same oppressors), whilst the descendants of the oppressors can often just keep on enjoying the loot inherited from their ancestors which was accumulated thanks to that oppression.
I would say that in Europe the Brits are the most extreme example of this (both because of the vast numbers of people there whose present day wealth come from ancestors who made that money through extreme exploitation of others, and because of just how relentlessly the “common blame” fables are deployed by the entire edifice of politics to disperse the responsability from the few to the many), though other nations with a colonialist past also have mainstream political factions following the same template to insulate Old Wealth from the consequences of inheriting blood money.
The thing is that the wealth that you inherent doesn’t have to come from victimizing others. I live in NL, we had a lot of slavery and the VOC became very rich ofof it. But most Dutch people aren’t decended from anybody who profitted from the slavery that happend. At the same time a lot of these massive companies from back in the day had a lot of funds go to the government or indirectly to the public in some other way. If the money can be traced back to slavery or whatever victimizing then yes tax it a lot (without the descendants getting into actual financial trouble because of it)
I agree btw, the angelo-saxton way of thinking is why they got to wealthy over the back of others. That’s part of the reason the climate for workers is better in western Europe (NL, DE, DK, etc)
Ps. I always wonder what actually happend with the VOC money since if you calculate the value of the money to todays value it would have been one of the biggest companies in the world (top 3 or something). Like we are rich, but not THAT rich.
My point is exactly that you should only go after wealth inherited from people who made that wealth by victimizing others, not from people who just happenned to be living in the same country or sharing the same race as the oppressors, even with claims that “they did nothing to stop it” (as if one’s peasant ancestors during the age of absolute monarchy were even aware of Slavery much less had the means to stop it).
The whole point of the “it’s the fault of race/nationality” crowd is exactly to steer people away from following the “who still now gains from it” link, by in practice chosing an interpretation of the blame for what happenned that turns the descendants of some victims of the oppressors the ones supposed to pay compensation to the descendants of other victims of the oppressors (often the very same oppressors), whilst the descendants of the oppressors can often just keep on enjoying the loot inherited from their ancestors which was accumulated thanks to that oppression.
I would say that in Europe the Brits are the most extreme example of this (both because of the vast numbers of people there whose present day wealth come from ancestors who made that money through extreme exploitation of others, and because of just how relentlessly the “common blame” fables are deployed by the entire edifice of politics to disperse the responsability from the few to the many), though other nations with a colonialist past also have mainstream political factions following the same template to insulate Old Wealth from the consequences of inheriting blood money.
I agree with you about that it should only punish those that directly benefit.