The offer. Every one of your children can receive up to £500,000 from you, entirely tax-free — on IFS figures, roughly 90% of heirs would receive everything they inherit untouched. And every citizen, whatever their parents have, receives a £50,000 endowment at 25: a universal inheritance, guaranteed.
How it is paid for. A 100% tax on whatever a person receives above that £500,000 lifetime threshold. Nothing is taken from the dead; nobody's life's work is touched while they live; the tax falls only on the windfall an heir did nothing to earn, above a threshold most will never reach. Only the excess that would otherwise found a dynasty funds everyone else's start. The full specification →
Why now. The largest wealth transfer in history — $124 trillion in the US alone through 2048, some $105 trillion of it going to heirs — is underway, and 2023 was the first year on record in which new billionaires acquired more wealth by inheritance than by entrepreneurship. The median American first-time homebuyer was 28 in 1991; she is 38 now. When the return on owning assets outruns the growth of wages, effort stops being the way up — and every ailment we file under "late-stage capitalism" (immobility, unaffordable housing, political capture, the quiet fatalism of the young) traces back to the same root: capital compounding across generations, largely untaxed at the moment of transfer. The diagnosis →
This is a pro-capitalist project. Markets, prices, profits, competition, the founder's right to everything they build — all untouched. What goes is the one transaction capitalism itself would never approve: the transfer of vast capital with no price, no competition, and no contribution test, to allocators chosen by birth. Like antitrust, this is a defence of the game against those who would end it. Why capitalists should want this →
Some things a fly-by sceptic probably doesn't know:
- The idea is older, and more capitalist, than you think. Thomas Paine proposed exactly this tax-plus-endowment pairing in 1797; John Stuart Mill originated the recipient-based cap; Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt made the capitalist and conservative cases. Anglo-American top rates reached 77–80% in the mid-20th century — decades of strong growth and high mobility. The lineage →
- Inheritance tax is the most hated tax in every country polled — and the most persuadable. Opposition rests on people wildly overestimating who pays (only 4.62% of UK deaths triggered any inheritance tax in 2022–23). In the landmark experiment, simply telling people how few estates pay more than doubled support for the tax — the largest persuasion effect measured for any tax. What the polling actually says →
- "The rich will just leave" is weaker than it sounds. The wealthy are embedded elites — late-career, married, business-anchored. Even the single most inconvenient study, which found 35% of billionaires left US states with an estate tax, concluded the tax still raised more revenue than the migration lost for the vast majority of states. The capital-flight evidence →
- Wealth is roughly twice as heritable as income, in every country with the data — which is why income-focused mobility policy keeps under-shooting. Mobility →
- The endowment is the tax's bodyguard. Hundreds of thousands of new 25-year-old stakeholders every year make repeal politically prohibitive — the design answer to the fate of every inheritance tax that came before. Entrenchment →
- We steelman the case against ourselves. The five strongest objections — family business, capital flight, the bequest motive, liberty, state failure — are given their best form, and where a residual survives, we say so. The case against →
Lead with the universal inheritance. The 100% rate is how it is paid for. That ordering — a generous family inheritance below the line, a universal one above it — is the whole political design, and this repository builds the evidence-based case for it: diagnosis, full mechanism, honest objections, and the strategy for making it mainstream. Quantitative claims have been checked against primary sources and cited; the handful that could not be confirmed are marked "(unverified)" in the linked files rather than asserted.
Start with the executive summary, or dive in below.
The premise comes first, then sixteen sections answer four questions in order: what is wrong → what do we propose → does it survive scrutiny → how does it actually happen.
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 00-capitalism/ | Why capitalism is worth saving — what it gets right, market vs dynastic capitalism, how untaxed inheritance brings the system down, the pro-market lineage of the idea, and what this proposal is not |
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 01-problem/ | Eleven chapters: wealth concentration, mobility, housing, political capture, meritocratic legitimacy, the rentier economy, the coming great wealth transfer, declining dynamism, elite overproduction, asset-price feedback, and social fatalism — one root cause |
| 05-history/ | The idea's lineage (Paine, Mill, Carnegie, Roosevelt, Piketty) and the rise, hollowing, and abolition of real inheritance taxes — the failure pattern the proposal is engineered against |
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 02-proposal/ | The full specification: recipient-based lifetime-cumulative mechanism, £500k/£750k thresholds, the £50k endowment at 25, carve-outs, anti-avoidance, revenue model, tax interactions, delivery, and entrenchment |
| 07-implementation/ | Every concrete difficulty with a designed answer: valuation, the receipt/parental-support boundary, schooling, nepo jobs, gifts, trusts, crypto, administration, enforcement, hard cases |
| 15-transition/ | Getting from today's law to the full scheme: sequencing ladder, anti-forestalling, grandfathering, pilots, UK/US legislative mechanics, the revenue bridge |
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 03-case-for/ | Eleven chapters for: ethics, economic efficiency, meritocracy, r > g, the heir's own interest (received and merely expected), optimal-tax theory, democratic renewal, the equal start, precedents of success, and why this beats a wealth tax |
| 04-case-against/ | The five strongest objections steelmanned — family business, capital flight, bequest motive, liberty, state failure — with honest residuals left standing |
| 08-capital-flight/ | The biggest objection given its own deep treatment: migration evidence, exit options, anchors, exit-tax design, retention, international coordination |
| 16-second-order/ | Honest futures analysis of life after adoption: philanthropy surge, asset prices, heirs' work, endowment outcomes, family culture, macro effects — welcome and unwelcome |
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 06-palatability/ | The evidence base: polling, framing psychology, coalition arithmetic, campaign case studies |
| 09-objections/ | The debate armoury: every "oh, but that won't work because…" with a concession, a one-line answer, and a link to the deep treatment |
| 10-opposition/ | Who will attack and how — the "death tax" playbook, media narratives, astroturf, legal challenges, co-optation and half-measures, the extra-legal escalation ladder, post-passage sabotage — each with mitigations |
| 11-geographies/ | Which societies adopt first (UK ranked most likely; Ireland the operating analogue) and which are gated |
| 12-political-adoption/ | The self-interested case for each party family — including why conservatives should want this — wedges, policy entrepreneurs, stepping-stones, and a verified map of receptive politicians |
| 13-movement/ | Recruiting and organising: theory of change, messengers, heir-defectors, organisational forms, funding, coalitions, precedent movements, the closing window, the founder's first year, the engagement ladder, and named outreach maps |
| 14-communications/ | Proselytising operations: naming, narratives, audience matrix, channels, creator outreach, campaign briefs, personal conversations (your kids, your friends), debate toolkit, Overton strategy, inoculation |
Several themes deliberately span sections; each has one owner per aspect:
- Objection-handling. 04-case-against/ owns the steelmen (the philosophical strongest form), 09-objections/ owns the quick-fire rebuttals, 10-opposition/ owns the attackers and their tactics. Arguments live in 04/09; actors and counter-strategy in 10.
- Capital flight. The steelman is 04-case-against/capital-flight.md; everything empirical and design-level is 08-capital-flight/.
- Persuasion. 06-palatability/ owns the evidence (what polls, what frames work), 14-communications/ owns the messaging operations, 13-movement/ owns the organising, 12-political-adoption/ owns the party politics.
- Sequencing. Political stepping-stones are 12-political-adoption/stepping-stones.md; the policy-engineering ladder is 15-transition/sequencing.md.
- Committed capitalist: 00-capitalism/ — this manifesto is on your side; start where we say why
- Sceptic: 04-case-against/ → 09-objections/
- "The rich will just leave": 08-capital-flight/
- "You can't actually account for inheritance": 07-implementation/
- Economist: 03-case-for/optimal-tax-theory.md → 02-proposal/revenue-model.md
- Campaigner: 06-palatability/ → 14-communications/ → 13-movement/
- Party strategist: 12-political-adoption/ → 11-geographies/
Third pass — verified. Full structure with content across all sixteen sections. A primary-source verification pass (July 2026) checked every flagged quantitative claim against original studies, official statistics, and primary texts: most were confirmed and are now cited inline with numbered sources; a substantial minority were corrected to what the sources actually support (including several claims that had been too favourable to the proposal); the few that could not be confirmed are marked "(unverified)" rather than asserted. Deliberate residuals remain: "Still to verify" research checklists, items awaiting the project's own distributional/compliance modelling, and claims testable only once a live campaign exists.