On May 18, 2021, while processing their divorce, Bill Gates and his wife Melinda confirmed their decision to leave “only 10 million dollars” for each of their three children, a pledge they had made earlier (the oldest being 17 at the time). Indeed, for one of the richest men in America, this is something of a humble decision and his grateful nation wildly applauded him. Given the parents’ enormous wealth, perhaps this is praiseworthy as a courageously paltry sum to leave to their children who could easily inherit billions.

But let’s think with some more thought in our head and ask ourselves more philosophically and intellectually: How is wealth inheritance decided, such as the $10 million between Bill and Melinda Gates? What is indeed a $10 million legacy from a couple who are your “parents” only by accident? In America, wealth received through parentage is still one of those lottery wins decided by sheer luck. By all accounts, while millions of dollars may change hands between parents and children, their connection is by the sheerest of random happenings. The connection could have been between any two people and the world would have remained just the same. It is indeed silly that America allows a great fortune to change hands just on the luck of the wheel of fortune.

America applauded the Gates when they announced that they would give only $10 million because the $10 million was such a small amount. The wealthy parents were wildly praised by the grateful nation for leaving only such a small amount to their children while they could have left billions each. Now, we need to think more practically, since we have a concrete sum to reckon with, and deploy our commonsense in figuring out what $10 million actually is as a monetary sum.

By our average reckoning, the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the sum is that you don’t ever have to work. Ten million dollars is enough to free you for life so that you never need to submit to the humiliation of employment. Just by sheer accident of biology, the Gates kids have been blessed with the fortune: They can play and play (that’s what you do when you don’t work) for the rest of their lives, while the rest of Americans are destined to work and work, for the rest of their lives.

In America where one’s work is still equivalent to modern “contract slavery,” not having to work is the rarest privilege that ranks (after clemency from death row) as the most precious benefit of an aristocratic era. It is still a privilege accorded only very few people in history. Especially in capitalist America where everybody’s dream is someday not having to get up to go to work, $10 million dollars is a ticket to freedom. It is a notice of liberation from the government, the schools, the religion, the neighbors, the bosses, just about any bondage of society that dooms us ordinary people to eternity — about as valuable as the indulgences from the Catholic Church which opened your passage to heaven in hell-scared feudal Europe.

By a flicker of his mind, perhaps faster than thought, Bill Gates, a fabulously rich man in America, plays God and decrees that his children, who are his children by lottery, shall be free forever from all obligations to society, to which everybody else obliges. What entitles him to this great power to grant this great privilege to his children who have never been known to have done anything yet on their own? How can mere children be declared permanently immune from the obligations of all citizens in a nation that is famous for its declaration that “all men are created equal” and its pledge to “liberty and justice for all” only because they are accidentally called “Gates?”

How does a living man anoint a future worker, citizen, member of society that automatically makes him free from his society by his parent’s act today? Whatever Bill Gates might do today, does he have the right to control America even after his death by today’s decree? Should his children not belong to America at all? One might argue that he can do anything with his money. After all, it’s his money, isn’t it? Yes, it is his money, all right, but not his children’s. Surely, Bill Gates can do anything with his money, but only for himself: He can drink, wear, drive, consume anything he wants with his money — for himself, now. But not for the future persons or events of American society, such as who shall work and who shall play long after he is dead.

And why is this sort of injustice and absurdity allowed to exist in America that values individual hard work and merit? Does the U.S. allow its president to give his presidency to his wife or his children when he retires, who will reap all the benefits thereof? Can an Army general give his stars, and all their attendant benefits, to his wife or children? Or, a professor his Ph.D. to his wife or children? The answer is, no, no and no. In a democratic America, each person and each generation must earn their own merit, and that’s what made America so revolutionarily new and different from the Old World of Europe. But in money matters, with inheritance, we are just as feudalistic as the medieval world from which we declared our freedom in blood and deaths.

In America, power is in two forms, one in the vote and the other in the dollar. We shouldn’t be so casual in giving away our power to the super-rich and their children as the peasants did with their kings and their bloodlines.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and professor emeritus, lives in Greenfield.

]]>