Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else? It’s a method of wealth redistribution, not just income distribution, it’s actually quite socialist, and one of the only such measures in our system.
Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.
Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else?
In theory, the problem is one of compounding assets. If you have a family farm with multiple inheriting children and the farm has to be sold to pay off the inheritence tax debt, who buys them? Inevitably, bigger industrial agriculture firms. So more and more plots are aggregated within a smaller and smaller number of privately owned farming companies.
In practice, this has already happened decades prior (centuries prior, if you look at the history of land ownership in Ireland). The people buying up small plots of land aren’t pioneering farmer entrepreneurs. They’re people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you’re not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You’re seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.
Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.
Wealth in the UK isn’t being redistributed, its being aggregated. The prior and current governments have gone all in on private equity as a cure for sluggish growth. This is purely Rich Guy on Rich Guy violence.
If you genuinely care about protecting the assets of the working class, you need less middling Starmerism and more radical Maoism.
The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
- Michael Parenti
They’re people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you’re not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You’re seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.
This is exactly what the policy is aiming to address. Even if it doesn’t fix the consolidation of farmland by big companies, I don’t see how addressing this loophole is a bad thing, especially when you describe the drawback to it as having already happened anyway
I don’t know what it’s like over in Canada, but here in Australia it seems like the two biggest problems farmers face are the increasingly extreme climate and the vicehold the supermarket duopoly has over the market, giving them both monopoly and monopsony power, allowing them to completely screw over farmers.
We have two main parties, one which has consistently been more in favour of action on climate change than the other, and which is also the less friendly one to corporate interests. We also have a third somewhat-major party that has extremely strong policies on climate change and monopolies. Guess which of these three parties farmers have consistently overwhelmingly voted for over the past 30+ years?
So nah, fuck 'em. They’ve brought it on themselves. I’ve no interest in taxpayers subsidising them.
But maybe circumstances in Canada are different.
Yeah, that pretty much sounds like the exact same thing here.
Good. Farmers need to be taxed and regulated like all other industries. Unchecked water usage has led to the most inefficient water methods and they don’t pay household rates for water. Little oversight in how pesticides are used so the farmer pays for a helicopter to swoop and spray the area, regardless of the need for pesticides on the entire field with down wind effects for anyone living in the path of the aerosol poisons.
Farmers need to change with the times and start farming like they have satellite pictures and basic math available to them.
