I have one those names, and come from a tradition where all the children inherit equally and if one is taking over the business, they buy the others out. (My dad bought the family farm from his parents. When they died, he bought his siblings out of their share of the remaining balance*.)
Primogeniture (or modified to a pick-one-inheritor-to-keep-the-business-intact variant) is a driver of some very bad outcomes, in societal, business, and familial terms.
Anyway, family farms have become so scarce they’re a terrible proxy for inheritance policy, but they do drive a lot of nostalgia-infected policy positions!
*plus some nuance from Family Drama. My dad got the short end of the stick in his family in many ways, but the general inheritance scheme was fine.
Yeah not trying to say that’s a good way of doing things, just that laws designed to limit generational wealth need to have realistic targets.
I was agreeing and riffing a bit. More “yes, and one thing we need to stop doing is using the “family farm” to paper-over how inheritance law is putting the thumb on the scale in bad ways” and think through what is fair. Leaving things to your kids is fine, fam legacy is fine. Scale can make it bad.
Also-also, I am tempted to go on my rant about how treating the real estate a business requires as a totally separate asset from the business itself is Bad, Actually, and one of the things that makes PE and consequences of estate law worse.