I was 25 when I released the first Mandrake Linux, in the summer of 1998. The idea itself cost nothing: a PC, an internet connection, a few months of nights. Everything that came after cost money we did not have, and we spent the following two years finding it. I was lucky. I know people of my generation who had better ideas than mine and never got to try them, for the most banal reason in the world: nobody around them had anything to lend.
This post is about a radical answer to that. I am not pretending it could pass tomorrow. I am putting it on the table because the debate it opens is one Europe has avoided for a century, and because the numbers behind it are far bigger than anyone admits.
The fact everybody knows and nobody says
In Europe today, the most important financial event in most people’s lives is not their career. It is what their parents leave them, and when.
This has been measured carefully. The annual flow of inheritances and gifts in France fell to under 5% of national income around 1950 and climbed back to about 15% by 2010, roughly the level of 1900. Germany, Switzerland and the UK show the same U-shaped curve. Inherited wealth now represents well over half of all private wealth in France and Germany. In plain terms, we are back to a society where where you end up depends mostly on what you were born into, which is the society the twentieth century thought it had abolished.
There is a second fact, less discussed: the age. Because we live longer, the average European now inherits in their fifties or sixties, at the moment in life when capital is least useful. The house is bought or never will be, the business is started or never will be, the children are grown. The money arrives after the decisions it could have changed.
And the scale is enormous. Across the Union, if the French and German ratios hold, somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 billion euros change hands every year through inheritance and gifts. That is the largest redistribution mechanism in Europe by far, larger than any budget. It redistributes from parents to their own children, late, and in wildly unequal amounts: one young person in ten receives most of it, the other nine receive little or nothing.
An idea with a long history
In 1797, Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer of the American and French revolutions, published Agrarian Justice: pay every person a capital sum on reaching adulthood, funded by a tax on inheritance. His reasoning was that nobody creates the land, the roads or the accumulated knowledge they are born into, so part of every fortune is a common inheritance, and a common inheritance should be shared by all heirs.
John Stuart Mill wanted to cap what any one person could receive by inheritance. The Italian economist Eugenio Rignano proposed in 1901 a tax that grew heavier at each successive transmission, so that fortunes would return to the community within two or three generations. More recently Anthony Atkinson (2015) and Thomas Piketty (2019, 120,000 euros for every French citizen at 25) revived the idea of a capital endowment for all. It has been debated in Germany, in Spain and in Italy in the last five years. Nothing came of it: the amounts were too small to change a life, or the country was too small to keep the money in.
The proposal
Inheritance becomes collective. Each child keeps the first 30,000 euros of what a parent leaves them. Everything above that, whether it arrives as an inheritance or as a gift during the parents’ lifetime, goes to a European inheritance fund. The surviving spouse is fully exempt: nobody loses their home when their partner dies; the transfer happens at the next generation.
The fund then pays out everything it receives, every year, to every young European, in three instalments: 20% at 20, 30% at 25 and the remaining 50% at 30. Unconditional. Nobody is asked what they will do with it.
Now the arithmetic. Eight to ten million children inherit something each year in the Union; at 30,000 euros each, that is 250 to 300 billion that stays in families. What remains, 1,200 to 1,700 billion, divided among the roughly 5 million people in each age cohort, gives a theoretical figure of 240,000 to 340,000 euros per person over the three instalments.
That figure will not be reached, and I would rather say so than let someone else. A tax at 100% does not collect 100%. People give earlier, spend more at the end of their lives, move assets abroad, undervalue what they own, build structures. If the fund collects half of the theoretical flow, which is a pessimistic and reasonable assumption, every young European receives in the order of 120,000 to 170,000 euros: about 30,000 at 20, 45,000 at 25 and 75,000 at 30, on the middle estimate. That is still more than the average European inherits today, and it arrives thirty years earlier.
Who wins, who loses
This is the part that people get wrong instinctively, so let me do the sum. In France, the median inheritance received is in the order of 70,000 euros; the average is around 120,000, pulled up by the top. Under this proposal a person keeps 30,000 from their parents and receives, say, 150,000 from the fund. Anyone whose inheritance would have been below about 180,000 euros comes out ahead, and receives the money at 20 to 30 instead of 60. That is roughly three Europeans out of four, probably more.
The people who lose are the heirs of the top tenth, at most the top fifth. And here I want to be precise about what “lose” means: they receive 150,000 euros like everyone else, at 20, 25 and 30. What they lose is the additional million, or the additional hundred million, that the accident of birth would have given them. The proposal does not take from the many to give to the few, nor even mainly from the rich to the poor. It takes from the age of 60 and gives to the age of 25, and from the accident of birth and gives to everyone born.
The house, the farm, the company
The first objection is physical. Each year several million homes, farms and companies would pass to the fund, which would become the largest seller of property in Europe overnight. That is not workable, and it is not the point. So: the heir who wants to keep the house, the land or the business keeps it. They owe the fund its value above the exemption, and they pay it over twenty or thirty years, at a low rate, secured on the asset itself. Nothing is sold unless the heir chooses to sell. The fund is a creditor, not a landlord, and its cash arrives over time rather than in one year, which is exactly the rhythm at which it pays out.
Notice what this does for a young person whose parents die: they can use their own instalments from the fund to buy back the family home. The money turns. For companies, the same mechanism applies, with one alternative: the heirs may pay in non-voting shares, which the fund holds with a cap and sells within twenty years, to the employees first. The fund carries, it does not manage.
Why this only works at federal scale
A country of 10 or 50 million cannot tax large inheritances seriously, let alone all of them: the money leaves for the neighbour, and the neighbour is two hours away by train. Every finance minister in Europe knows this, which is why inheritance taxes on the very rich have been hollowed out everywhere over forty years, one exemption at a time. Germany today exempts business assets outright, and collects 39 billion on 250 to 400 billion transmitted.
A federation of 450 million people with one rule, gifts and inheritances assessed together over a lifetime, taxation at the residence of the heir, and an exit tax on those who leave, is a different animal. You do not escape to Brussels what applies in Brussels. Some of it will still leak, and I have assumed half. But a measure that is impossible at national scale becomes merely difficult at continental scale, and this is the strongest practical argument I know for federal fiscal power.
What it does to a life
Thirty thousand euros at 20 is the deposit that makes a first flat possible, or the training that changes a trajectory. Forty-five thousand at 25 is a year of runway to build something before going back to a salaried job if it fails. Seventy-five thousand at 30, when most people have decided what they want and have children on the way, is the difference between a life of monthly payments and a life with margin.
Above all it is the right to fail once. The children of wealthy families fail all the time; it is called experience, and it is what makes them successful at 35. Everyone else gets one attempt, if that, and a failed attempt is a decade of debt. What this proposal generalises is not wealth. It is the thing wealth actually buys, which is a second chance.
The honest downsides
They are serious, and I list them because a proposal this radical deserves its objections stated by its author.
- It ends dynasties. The Arnaults, Quandts and Wallenbergs of the next century would not exist as such; the founders keep everything they built, their grandchildren start with the same 150,000 as everyone else. I consider this a feature. Many will not, and the debate about whether a civilisation should have hereditary economic power is exactly the debate I want to open.
- It weakens the motive to save. Part of Europe’s long-term savings exists in order to be passed on. Some of that saving would turn into consumption. The counterargument is that the capital is not destroyed but redistributed to people who will invest it in housing, training and businesses at 25 rather than hold it at 75. I believe the counterargument; I cannot prove it.
- Capital flight. Even at federal scale, some of the largest fortunes will find a way out. I have assumed a 50% leak, which is why the realistic figure is 150,000 rather than 300,000. If the leak is worse, the figure falls; the mechanism does not break.
- Fear beats arithmetic. Three out of four people gain, but every wealth tax in history has been defeated by the fear that “they will take the house”, including among people who owned no house. This proposal will face the same. The only answer is to lead with what people receive, not with what is collected, and to make the right to keep the family home impossible to misunderstand.
- The fund becomes powerful. A body that holds claims on a large part of European property and companies is a body that must be watched. Hence: it is a creditor with a fixed rule, not an investor with discretion; its stakes are non-voting, capped and sold; its accounts are public to the euro. Sweden proposed wage-earner funds in 1976 and recoiled from what looked like nationalisation by stealth. The design must make that reading impossible.
- Housing prices. Five million people receiving capital in the same year pushes up prices in tight markets, and sellers pocket part of the inheritance. Spreading payments over three ages helps; phasing the scheme in over a decade helps more; the housing measures later in this series are the real answer.
What we are really deciding
Strip away the mechanics and the question is simple. Every year, Europe’s parents leave their children between 1,500 and 2,000 billion euros. Today that sum goes to a few, at 60. The proposal is that it go to all, at 20, 25 and 30, with each family keeping a first share for itself.
Nobody is left without an inheritance, including the children of the rich, who receive the same as everyone else. Nobody loses their home. What disappears is the idea that the size of your start in life should depend on the size of your parents’ bank account. We abolished inherited titles two centuries ago and called it progress. Inherited fortunes are the last aristocracy, and this is what it would take to end it.
This post is part of “A quest called Europa”, a series on what a European federation could actually put in the life of the people living in it. It starts here: Europe isn’t broken. Few want it, yet. Next post: dignity, or the end of the client state. If you want the next one by email, the series has a home page with a sign-up form.
Gaël Duval, September 2026. Creator of Mandrake Linux and /e/OS, CEO of Murena. I believe Europe’s nations no longer carry any weight on their own, and that a federal Europe is the only way not just to keep them from disappearing, but to give their people something immense to hope for again. That is why I write this.
This series is written with the help of AI tools for research, structure and drafting. The ideas, the choices and the mistakes are mine.