Theology is all about death: how to console both those who are about to die and the survivors who mourn their passing in the full knowledge that death will in turn seek them out as inevitably as the IRS.
But there is something differently theological about the manner in which some people in Congress obsess about the so-called death tax. The IRS’ post-mortem attentions to the oblivious deceased have attained the thermo-nuclear heat of eternal hellfire in the fevered imaginings of some congressmen and lobbyists. I connect this unsettling phenomenon to their attempts to deny Darwin.
Capitalism’s ethical justification is that it rewards the clever and entrepreneurial and does not reward (or even punishes) the not-so-bright and enterprising. In doing so, as our old chum Adam Smith told us, it enhances the common good, sorts the wheat from the chaff, and so on.
If the congressmen have their way, the chaff will inherit the world. Dishwashers, gardeners and market peddlers will all pay 20 percent of their hard-earned cash in tax on minimum wages, but the idle offspring of the affluent will escape scot-free as their windfalls thud into their bank accounts. Allowing unfettered inheritance of wealth and power returns us to feudalism, with chinless idiots ruling because their parents and grandparents did.
There are several logical deductions to be made about the thought process of those who die rich but intestate – or un-trusted, as it were. The deceased may have been an honest soul who wanted to fulfill their social duties and give Uncle Sam his due. They may not have liked or trusted any of their relatives enough to pass on their hard-earned wealth to them. Or they may have been so arrogant that they thought they would either live forever or be able to take it all with them.
Maybe the deceased didn’t give an aeronautical fornication for what happened when they were dead and gone. Maybe they were so feckless and stupid that they just did not bother to do any estate planning. Or maybe they’re counting on dying in 2010, when the estate tax will be whimsically repealed for one year only.
In all but the last case, we can presume the deceased thought their heirs had enough competence to make their own way in the world, and so felt that swamping their natural talents in unearned gold would be bad for them and society.
Or perhaps they themselves were so dimwitted that there is a strong possibility that their heirs would also be intellectually and entrepreneurially challenged. In that case, nothing becomes them like their going, since the whole of society benefits from the reduction of the wealth and power of a bunch of cretinous remittance babes.
The (mostly affluent) members of the legislature who are fretting about this subject, and who are prepared to add some $700 bn to the huge national debt to achieve a reduction in estate tax, really make a case for increasing estate taxes closer to 100 percent. However, the recurring family names in Congress suggest that these families have their trusts sorted out – even if they have a trust problem with the public.
