Sébastien Dugauguez

Can a consistent libertarian conclude that inheritance is obsolete?For centuries, liberal thinkers were right to defend it. Lives were short, families were large, and productive assets required continuous labor to be preserved across generations. Those conditions no longer hold. Reasoning strictly from the premises of classical and Austrian liberalism, with no egalitarian assumptions, this essay reaches a startling conclusion: the abolition of private economic inheritance is not a left-wing demand, but the logical completion of the liberal project itself.
What was once a necessary institution has become a state-enforced rent claimed in the name of the dead. It is not free-market capitalism. It is crony capitalism, and it contradicts the principle that property must be justified by action, not by birth. The abolition proposed here eliminates taxes on labor, savings, and enterprise. Above all, it offers a coherent, non-inflationary way out of the unsustainable spiral of public debt.
Sébastien Dugauguez is a French libertarian philosopher and engineer, and the author of the most dangerous idea in free-market thought.