Inheritance Laws Quotes
There are many who wish for such a simple adoption procedure today.
In England when a landowner died, the eldest son inherited all the land. In Ireland at that time, the land was equally divided among all the sons. This subdivision over several generations produced smaller and smaller land holdings at the same time when new agricultural technology was making the smaller farm an uneconomical entity. Although the Irish system was fairer, it destroyed Irish agricultural productivity.
In every society where there had been past unjust ownership of land, all efforts of land reform were faced with the problem of having to dispossess the current “owners” who themselves had not been guilty of the crimes of their ancestors in unjustly obtaining the land originally. In America land reform was unworkable in most cases and the solution was usually a large monetary payment as compensation for the land.
A fief was an estate of land and people. The man who had the title to the fief was obligated to raise troops from his estates and lead then at the command of the King. Women, under English law could not inherit a fief—it went to the oldest son. However, once the military element of fiefdom was eliminated, Johnson saw no reason why women should no longer inherit feifs and the titles that went with them.
Primogeniture is the system where property is inherited from the father to the first born son. At the time women could not own property unless they were widows. It is the basis of most aristocracies. See {627010} for an American view of primogeniture that was stated a little earlier.
Conservatives have been trying to eliminate estate taxes—sometimes called “inheritance taxes” for years. One of their most effective techniques was to create their own pejorative language to describe estate taxes and then to have all conservatives use that description and never say “estate taxes”. While this shifted public opinion somewhat, the majority of Americans still tended to agree with Sanders and estate taxes remained in force then. The estate taxes only were levied on the wealthiest Americans—less than 2 percent.
