On June 9th, by a majority of two thirds, Congress representatives voted to repeal the federal estate tax. The most impressive thing, however, was to hear arguments for the repeal being advanced on moral grounds. It seems that at least some politicians grasped the fact that justice should not discriminate against the richest.
Under current law a progressive death tax is applied to estates exceeding $675,000, and in cases of family-owned businesses and farms, exceeding $1.3 million. The tax top rate of 55% indicates the lawmakers’ belief that the rightful owner of men’s wealth is the government.
One of the fundamental principles of Western Civilization, represented by the blinded statue of justice, is that all people should be equal before the law. The principle is that the law should be equally applied to all individuals, regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, sex, profession, class, or wealth.
The estate tax law is a perversion of justice. It robs justice of her blindfold and makes her look inside people’s pockets. Then it forces some to let go of their possessions. The more possessions, the more they have to let go. The estate tax law discriminates against the most productive — the richest. It treats them as robbers and takes away their property. The estate tax law turns the government, which exists to protect individual rights, into an insatiable and monstrous looting machine.
It is a shame to forcefully take away from a living family whatever was left from the fruits of their relative’s lifetime of labor. It is unjust that Americans, who pay taxes over their whole lives, are made to pay them again at their death.
How do the advocates of the death tax justify their position?
Most of them view “reductions in the estate tax as an unjustified giveaway to the rich,” but conveniently ignore that no money would be given the richest — that they would just keep whatever is already theirs.
The altruist/socialist perspective is well represented by Representative Bernard Sanders of Vermont, who branded as immoral “a system in which a handful of the wealthiest people in the country stood to get a huge tax break while the needs of the poor went unaddressed.”
Here the moral code of altruism comes to the surface. Altruism does not mean helping others. Altruism means sacrificing oneself for others. Sacrifice, according to altruism, is more than a virtue — it’s a duty. Therefore the more possessions one has, the more one should sacrifice oneself for the ones who don’t. And if the rich will not sacrifice themselves for others of their own volition, then it is the government’s role to physically force them to carry out their “moral duty”.
Socialism, the political implementation of altruism, which demands the sacrifice of the individual to the group, and of the best to the worst, stands always ready to come in and do the necessary sacrificing, as was fully demonstrated in the Communist and Nazi regimes.
True to his professed altruism, President Clinton promised to veto the death tax repeal “without hesitation,” giving as an excuse that it would be “too expensive”, and would “jeopardize” America’s fiscal discipline.
But the total amount of estate tax collected in 1998 was twenty billion dollars. It represents only 1% of the present federal budget. How could this tiny difference “jeopardize” the country? And if it did, how does the president justify giving away tens of billions of dollars to third world countries?
All their rationalizations boil down to the belief that the “poor” have a right to the possessions of the “rich”. The wealthy are an easy target — they are a small minority, they are envied, and they are morally disarmed to defend themselves because of the prevailing morality of altruism, which equates rational selfishness with vice, and personal profit with evil.
Advocates of the death tax and other forms of “progressive” taxation, hold that justice does not mean equality of rights before the law, but equality of results enforced by law.
In their view, justice is a tool for the distribution of property, not for its protection (this inversion of justice is often called “social justice”). In their understanding justice is an instrument for initiating the use of force, and not a means of combating it. They see themselves as modern “Robin Hoods”, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
They do not recognize the principle of individual rights, which is the base of the right to property, which declares that the rich have and equal right to their own property, just as the poor have the equal right to their own property. Or, to quote John Adams,
“It is agreed that ‘the end of all government is the good and ease of the people, in a secure enjoyment of their rights, without oppression’; but it must be remembered, that the rich are people as well as the poor; that they have rights as well as others; that they have as clear and as sacred a right to their large property as others have to theirs which is smaller; that oppression to them is as possible and as wicked as to others.”
It is easy to deprive minorities such as the richest from their rights. It is much harder to prevent the erosion of everybody else’s rights once the richest have none.
The death tax is a shameful injustice. It is morally wrong and is a violation of the principle of individual rights. Let us kill the death tax so that we, the living, may be free.
