It was that argument that finally swayed me on the Estate Tax argument. For every cry of “But I worked hard for this money, I should be allowed to provide for my family” there are a lot of cries from the families of those upon whose backs that money was actually made.

And come to think of it, how many times has a truly rich person gotten that way solely for the benefit of their children? How often do you run into the obscenely rich living as though they had a modest income, and saying “Oh, I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing this so that my kids and their kids and theirs will never have to work a day in their lives.”

Those who never earned their money don’t value a work ethic. Those who at least worked to earn their obscene horde value work and are less likely to WANT to give their progeny lives of pampered luxury. Look at Warren Buffet, who amassed huge amounts of money but recently gave away almost all of it through grants to the Bill & Melinda Gates charitable foundations.

The fact is, we’re not supposed to have a class system in this country, and that includes a permanent aristocracy based on dynastic money, often earned on the backs of the exploited, from the slaves on the plantations to the average working man back in pre-Union days. Heck, the minimum wage earner of today can merely watch as a few men in suits at the top of their corporation (who rake in salaries hundreds of thousands of percent higher than their own earnings) make decisions more or less at random. And when those decisions are bad and lead the company into hard times, the people at the bottom get laid off in droves with a few weeks of severance pay, while that CEO at the top (whose decisions directly led to the failure) is let go with bonuses valued at several years worth of his already inflated salary.

That, in the end, is the argument. If you can show me what most of the people in the top 2% of society did to actually earn or deserve their vast riches, then I’ll have a lot more sympathy for the argument about it being taken away. Leave enough for your children to give them some comfort, to make sure they’ll never starve. Anything beyond that, you couldn’t tax it at a high enough rate that I’d think it was unfair.

It’s not your legacy, it’s your leftovers. It’s the amount you served onto your plate beyond that which you could ever actually finish eating, and often leaving too little for the people behind you in line at the buffet.

Liam.