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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING

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To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (14273)	6/6/2002 12:39:51 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (2) of 21057

This discussion has little grounding in reality. The estate tax, as with most taxes, in fact depends upon a transaction to take effect. The transaction is the conveyance of the estate to the heirs. The rationale has nothing to do with "deferred taxes". It has to do with anxieties about concentrations of property in a democracy, and the desire to put a brake on wealth by inheritance. Two principles vie with one another: the idea that one can dispose of one's property as one pleases, even by testament; and the idea that unearned wealth (by the heir) is more vulnerable to confiscation than earned wealth would be. These have their correlates in political economy: the idea that capitalism, and therefore economic development, demands substantial ownership rights, against the idea that democracy cannot tolerate excessive concentration of wealth(whatever "excessive" is taken to mean). The horror of concentrations of property is not as great as it might have been, considering that we are no longer an agrarian society, and most wealth is invested; and considering the size of the population, so that even the top 5% of the wealthy translates into millions of people..........

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