> Screw their offspring?

I agree that inheritance shouldn't be a natural right. I don't really expect to receive anything from my parents.

However, things like rampant anti-development attitudes are an untenable example of screwing their offspring. The older generation already owns houses, so they love opposing any new development without regard for the fact that it's making home ownership impossible for all but the wealthiest or luckiest of my generation.

> so they love opposing any new development without regard for the fact that it's making home ownership impossible for all but the wealthiest or luckiest of my generation.

I doubt very much that the effect it has on price of existing real estate and how it limits the market is something that the decision to oppose growth is made "withour regard for".

Oh, you're right that they absolutely consider the gains to their own wealth which can come from such policies.

The cognitive dissonance is when they then turn around and wonder why kids these days (including their own) can't afford to live on their own.

What the fuck is the point of life if not to leave your descendants better off than you? What a depressingly narcissistic brand of individualism.

Moreover, if you refuse to help your descendants and expect them to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" like you did because (ultimately) "it builds character," you shouldn't be surprised when they get their asses handed to them in life by the multigenerationally wealthy that were playing the game from the start.

Property rights are laws of man not laws of nature. The law of nature is that the strong take from the weak. To the extent property rights and other enacted laws create a permanent underclass of people who feel they were born into a raw deal then mismatched generational expectations will be the least of our problems. Expect serious turbulence in the decades to come. As Milton Friedman wisely said "the Earth belongs to the living".

I have a physician relative who told me how bad he felt about elderly people who die alone and afraid, and whose children are somewhat disinterested when they pass.

But then he pointed out that these same parents kick their kids out of the house at 18 without much compassion.

I guess parents do have the right to do what they like with their wealth and to force their kids out to fend for themselves, but they need to accept the consequences.

As my mother-in-law lay in her deathbed, she actively tried to get her kids to fight over what little remained in her estate after she had already squandered most of what her husband had saved before he died.

One of her last statements to my spouse was, "They're in cahoots against you."

Some people should have died alone.

Presumably the parents themselves have inherited themselves.

I think the most appropriate way to approach an inheritance is that your job as the inheritor is to be a custodian.

Sure, you can absolutely blow the money on scratch-tickets or throw it into the wind but I don't consider that to necessarily be very moral or ethical.

This is a terrible attitude to have if you care about the long-term viability of your family.

My parents have inherited a little bit of money - it'd be a fortune where I grew up, although you couldn't buy a house in SF with it - but that money isn't really theirs, just like it won't be mine when they are gone. It's the slowly, painfully built fortune of the entire lineage, going back to before 1900, and it's something to be carefully grown and protected. If any generation blows it, there goes the cushion that we've worked for decades to climb out of subsistence farming to the middle class.