I replied that the IHT exemption is great for those who have an reasonable actuarial chance of dying in between 2 years after purchase and whenever they sell the stock (you need to hold them for 2 years to get the Business Asset exemption). Many people, especially younger people, are not in that category. It would be nice to think that younger investors of modest means could get a very limited tax benefit from taking a risk on the future of UK plc without needing to die in order to realise their gain.

Suppose you’re right in this belief, and you are in fact an individualist, what kind of a belief is that? As a philosophy, it’s too vague. Does it mean that you believe that social systems based on voluntary exchange are “better” than ones based on force and fraud? Okay, but better in what sense? Once you delve into these questions, then you can start to delineate your beliefs. One of the conditions that you’ve set is to be concise. But you to summarize your beliefs, you must have beliefs to summarize. And if concision is the goal, why the redundancy of including both “rational” and “objective”. Granted, there are differences between being rational and being objective, but they are subtle. And by the way, whose happiness are you pursuing? and, even more important, why are you pursuing happiness at all? You dismiss virtue, but if you live a virtuous life, what need do you have for happiness? (Feel free to substitute “honorable,” “courageous,” “inventive,” in place of “virtuous” if you prefer; the point remains.)

You have stated an interesting idea, though, which is your belief that when people “act against their apparent incentives,” this indicates a lack of sincerity—they are pursuing “undisclosed incentives rather than virtue.” By “undisclosed,” I assume you mean consciously concealed, because otherwise where’s the problem? Certainly, it’s true that people respond to incentives, but they aren’t always conscious of what those incentives are. If they were, their minds would be overburdened. That doesn’t make them insincere. And neither can an observer of them be aware of all their incentives. This like saying that if you cannot observe an incentive to explain someone’s behavior, there must be an incentive that you haven’t observed. In other words, people only act to pursue their incentives (i.e., they are solely purposeful in their actions). Fine, maybe so, but how is “virtue” inconsistent with this? What if one of their incentives is to be virtuous?

By the way, your blog’s really interesting. I apologize for this unrestrained and wordy comment. This particular post just got me thinking. And I generally share the values you mentioned as well as your philosophical outlook; I just think you can write a better belief statement than the one in this post. (And by the way your current “About” statement, which is closed to comments, says that you like “ethic” food. I think you meant “ethnic”.)

Also, he partly inspired me to join the blog-culture, so there’s a debt of gratitude in here somewhere

All best,

B