I took some grief for my position on death taxes. I am not surprised. The tax debate in America has been so cluttered with group-think there’s simply no way to stake out a position on taxes that does not get someone fired up. Liberals are supposed to be for high rates, progressivity, social engineering and fairness, whatever the hell that means. Conservatives are supposed to be for lower taxes, business incentives and different types of social engineering. Libertarians are supposed to be for no taxes and free weed.

The trouble here is none of those positions make any sense. The point of taxation is to fund government. The point of government is to address “common burdens”. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, that meant military service, fortress work, and bridge repair. As human societies have become more complex and interdependent, the number of things considered “common burdens” has increased. Roads, schools, hospitals, parks and other things have all be put in that basket, requiring greater government and greater taxation.

The point here is there can be but one position on this aspect of taxation. That is, the tax rates must be sufficient to pay for the cost of government. Once you uncouple taxes from government services, taxes become theft. They may be lawful and commonly accepted theft, but they are theft nonetheless. That means the amount of tax is irrelevant. All that matters is what to tax in order to fund government.

How I come at it this is to ask which taxes have the least impact on the natural functioning of society? Road taxes, for example, are an attempt to peg taxes to usage. The more you use, the more you pay. That links the value of the road to the cost of the road. Ideally, taxes will have zero impact on the economic decisions of the people. That’s not always possible, but it should be the goal of tax policy. Otherwise, the impact of the tax could very well exceed the value of the tax.

An example of the latter is George Bush’s luxury tax on expensive toys. Rich people are not infinitely rich. The guy that could swing a yacht before the tax was priced out of it after the tax so he bought something else that was not subject to the tax, like stocks or real estate. Thus the tax was never paid, all the yacht workers lost their jobs and stopped paying income taxes.

That brings me back to the death tax. No matter how high the tax, there will never be a change in the mortality rate. It has been stubbornly fixed at 100% for years now. Experts predict it will remain 100% long into the future. That means confiscating all of the goods from the dead will not do much to change human behavior, at least in regard to dying.

Now, Joseph K makes what I think is the best argument against death taxes:

The estate tax is the single biggest cause of the rise and dominance of Progressivism in the 20th century. The formation by business magnates of massive charitable foundations in order to save their fortunes from government depredation created a massive slush fund for the financial support and promulgation of every lunatic Progressive idea in existence. Without the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur and other foundations, Progressive lunacy as we know it would not exist. Heck, PBS and Sesame Street, which poisoned the minds of innocent children with liberal dreck for generations, would not exist.

Taxation, particularly the estate tax, wrecked the landed aristocracy that ruled England for centuries, and which ruled half the earth for the better at its height, leaving a battered welfare state carcass currently being picked clean by the feral children of former colonial lands. One cannot call this progress.

There are a few things here. The first being that the rich will do crazy things with their money in order to avoid the tax. I’ll concede that point, even though I doubt that’s really what’s going on with these foundations. These are monuments to their own lives, in the same vein as monuments or great public buildings in antiquity. The royalty returning with booty from France in The 100 Years War built castles in honor of themselves, not to avoid taxes.

That said, the death tax could cause all sorts of behavior in an attempt to keep the fortune alive after the death of the plutocrat. That’s why I specifically avoided any discussion of exemptions. If you’re going to have a death tax, it must be 100% and universal – no exceptions. The use of insurance to mitigate the tax for businesses and family farms is not an exemption; it is private mitigation. Setting up foundations and trusts would not be exempt either. The money would have to be given away in life.

The other piece of his argument is that destroying the wealth of the rich has unintended downstream consequences. Toppling over the landed aristocracy, for example, opened the door for socialist lunatics to seize power. I’m not entirely sure about that timeline, but I’ll concede the greater point. Wiping out the rich through taxes is not consequence free and those consequences are not always known.

That’s why I specifically said the rich can give away their wealth before death. To quote myself,

“There’s nothing to prevent Bill Gates from giving his fortune away. He would just have to do it while he is alive. If he wants to set his kid up with a billion dollar gift, that’s his choice. That option exists now. Whatever is left upon his death will go to the government.”

The trouble with everything I’m saying here is summed up by juice.qr.

“what gets me is you make several points about how ‘if it such and such was implemented’ , ‘if it was done this way’ … problem is none of your brilliant fixes have been implemented, or are likely to be.”

That, I think, bookends Joseph K’s argument very well. Even if the defects of the death tax can be addressed, the people doing the addressing have insurmountable defects, primarily the fact that they are crooks, liars and lunatics. The death tax gives them the tools to inflict much wickedness on the people.

To sum up, I’m convinced that the death tax can never be done well and I’m open to the argument that a not done well death tax is way worse than other taxes not done well.