The Estate Tax is Wealth Confiscation

July 7, 2002

by Charles E. Perry

You work hard all your life and build up a significant amount of wealth. You want to leave a nice nest egg for your children, to help them out when you are no longer around to do so. You die, and the government steps in to confiscate about half of your accumulated wealth. I’ve always wondered just what the moral basis for that was, and I’ve never run across anyone who can tell me what it is. I understand the moral basis for taxes in general: we all have to pay for government. That idea just doesn’t apply here, since I’m certainly not going to be needing government after I die. I’ve heard a number of reasons for the death tax over the years. Let’s just examine them and see if they hold water.

People should have to work for their money. That’s true, and I did. The money I earned over my lifetime is mine, so why can’t I dispose of it as I see fit? That people have to work for their money provides no moral basis for the government taking money I worked for just because I died.

We don’t want an "aristocracy of money," so we need to break up large fortunes. Says who? And where can I find this concept in the Constitution? The Constitution is geared to clearing the way for me making money and prospering. It seems absurd to believe that the Founders would protect our right to property, and to prosper from that property, only to confiscate the wealth once we earned it. The right to property, and to dispose of that property as we see fit, is fundamental to the Constitution.

It’s taxing unearned income. No, it’s not. It’s the estate which is taxed, not the beneficiaries, and a bequest is not legally income to start with. This and the first two reasons stated above are all based on the premise that being richer than other people is somehow wrong, and you should be punished for it. That’s a concept the authors of the Constitution would have found laughable, and they certainly didn’t provide for government to be able to confiscate wealth based on it. Furthermore, the wealth was already taxed, as I earned it. What I have to leave my heirs is what’s left after the government already had its paws on it at least once.

It’s not really mine, because I’m dead. As absurd an argument as I’ve ever heard. If it’s not really mine, why am I legally entitled to appoint an estate manager to act in my stead, to see that it’s dispursed as I desire? I earned it, so how isn’t it mine. And if my dying makes it the government’s, why don’t they just take it all?

You know, I’ve read the Constitution over and over, and I can’t find anything which gives the government the authority to tax estates. Originally, they were limited to imposts, excises, and duties. Later, that was expanded to include income, but we already know that a bequest isn’t income. The estate tax is an unconstitutional confiscation of your wealth after you die. We should be outraged, and we should demand a permanent repeal.

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Charles E. Perry is a freelance writer living in Michigan. He has done a variety of things in his life, including Ward Supervisor at the State of Michigan's Maximum Security Mental Facility. His degree is in accounting, but he discovered writing and now spends his time hunched over a keyboard, hollow-eyed, looking for just the right word. Perry is the author of "How Government Should Work: A Look at the Federalist Papers and the Constitution of the United States," currently pending publication.

Send the author an E mail at Perry@ConservativeTruth.org.

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