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Pastimes : My House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (4360)	1/9/2003 11:27:12 AM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

But don't you feel that it would bring an extra good from Gary Winnick's death? Winnick (I actually had to look him up, I had forgotten who he is) is supposedly involved in philanthropy already, and even without an estate tax perhaps some of the wealth would be passed on to foundations and the like anyway, not ne'er do well relatives. Whether he has $700MM or 7 thousand or million or trillion doesn't really matter to me; if it's his, it should be his decision what to do with it. If we are going to confiscate wealth merely because it is large and might tend to p*ss off the rest of us (envy is green), then I suppose we can all move back towards a model that Marx advocated and the Soviets pretended to (but didn't actually) follow. The premise I don't believe in is that it is inherently good (or "extra good" <g>) to have money go to the government. I believe that government serves valid functions and needs to be funded. I also believe that it is inherently inefficient and wasteful in most forms, and it can be very difficult to impose or enforce any sort of financial discipline upon it. The one good thing I can say about the estate tax is that it does seem to encourage the superrich to set up foundations to do things which qualify for a tax exemption. Maybe they wouldn't do those things without the tax sword hanging over their heads, or maybe they would. Many of these foundations have done a lot of good things over the years. But overall, I think it is better to leave decisions about spending and consumption in the hands of private individuals, not government.