Back to schoool, back to schooool

As happy as I am that UT Law made the decision to get rid of the Subway-o'-Scary-Meat, I'm having trouble understanding why they haven't put any new restaurants in yet. Are we too fat? Do they want us to starve so that we talk less? Right now the only choices a hungry law student has are:

1. Candy or chips from the vending machines
2. An assortment of "day old pastries" from the coffee cart.
3. Licking the floor of that room where they have all the buffet meet and greets in the hopes of subsisting off of dehydrated barbecue sauce.

I find these options unappealing at best.

There are also a damn lot of people in the hallways. Where did they all come from? Were there this many people last year? As 1L's you tend to move in packs, but as a now-haughty 2L I'm usually walking around without a posse - I think this makes the packs of 1L's seem a lot bigger and a lot more in the way. I can understand all the glares we got last year when we all trooped to class ten minutes early and crowded up the halls. Sorry. We didn't know any better.

The most interesting readings that I've done so far were assigned with the direction "this is just general - we won't discuss in class". They were about the question of inheritance, and whether or not it should be allowed. I'd never really considered the concept of disallowing inheritance so I was pretty intrigued. And the debate centers around a conflict that I feel a lot when I try to evaluate certain issues: We don't want to perpetuate extremes of wealth and poverty, but we're a very individualist people who can't imagine taking someone's property away.

One guy (by "guy" I mean "respected scholar whose name escapes me") makes a good point that the idea of inheritance not be as natural of a right as we think. One guy suggests that you should only be able to bequeath a certain amount of money/property, and says that healthy, adult children of the deceased shouldn't get anything. I think this idea is kind of crappy, especially when taken to extremes.

Another guy says we should just make it that no one can inherit more than $1 million in their lifetime. Then he points out that his plan will never get support (then why suggest it?) bc liberals want inheritance reform that puts money into the state, where they (liberals) can share in decisions about what to do with it. He basically says that they're pushing for a very specific reform under the guise of fairness when it's really about power (for the record, I have no idea if this is true,but I thought it was interesting).

Then a bunch of these guys get to the issue of true inherited wealth, and some of them say that even eliminating inheritance wouldn't change the class system bc the primary method of class transmission happens in the form of social and formal education. So what if your kid won't get your ten million when you die? You can use it to send him to the best schools,the best college, he can travel around the world and learn 7 languages. He'll become rich on his own bc of the advantages of your wealth.

Interesting theories, eh? I feel like a lot of them are just empty rhetoric to try and justify keeping things the same, but I thought I'd share bc I hadn't read that much about the topic before.