Yesterday I was a guest on a podcast. My conversation with host Faiz Kamaludin of The Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Show turned to inheritance tax, and I let slip that I find it incredible that we still don’t have something like a 99% inheritance tax.

I know, you can drive people completely crazy with that. They shout: “Taxes have already been paid on that money. Income tax, dividend tax, wealth tax, VAT, and you can keep going. And then when I die, I have to pay again.”

That’s not entirely true, of course, because when you’re dead you can’t do anything anymore. It’s your heirs who have to deal with the tax authorities.

I won’t mention any names, but suppose you’re worth around 900 billion dollars and have fourteen children. If you divide it all neatly between them, they each get around 64 billion. Well, maybe one gets a little less because she did something Dad doesn’t approve of, but it’s still bizarre.

The simple fact that, without having proved, learned or achieved anything, you inherit a fortune simply because you happened to crawl out of the right womb.

I’m not going to tell you how I’ve arranged my own inheritance. Of course you want to leave your children something. And as long as there is no proper system for what happens to large fortunes after you die, you have to come up with your own solution. Leave it to a good cause or spend it while you’re still alive. Good for the economy.

My children know how I feel about this and they know where they stand. And they understand.

The French economist Thomas Piketty has some interesting ideas about it. In Capital and Ideology, he proposes a highly progressive tax on large inheritances, linked to a kind of universal inheritance. Everyone would receive substantial start-up capital from society around the age of 25. In today’s money, that could be somewhere around $150,000. For the very largest fortunes, tax rates in Piketty’s proposals could rise toward 90 percent or even higher.

So at the beginning of your adult life, you get start-up capital. You can use it to buy a house, start a business or get some additional education.

Because why should my children be entitled to a much better financial start than the child of someone who owns nothing?

I think that a hundred years from now we’ll be done with this old-fashioned way of thinking about ownership. Maybe we shouldn’t simply deposit $150,000 into children’s bank accounts. Instead, they could have access to a fund that allows them to buy a house, start a business or pay for an education. So that not every 25-year-old buys a Porsche or goes on vacation for three years.

So let’s raise inheritance taxes. But not so governments can use the money to plug yet another hole in the budget. Earmark it to create equal opportunities for young people at the beginning of their adult lives. Give them the economic freedom to start a business, for example.

And at the same time, stop creating generations of millionaires and billionaires who never had to do anything to earn it.

Back From The Future is my blog on Monday, Wednesday and Friday: looking at today’s problems from the perspective of 2125. This is #57.