Anti-Capitalists routinely confuse relative wealth preservation as a property right. All that a capitalist is entitled to is an opportunity to place their wealth at risk once again.

The pieces of arguments over at Jacks place are just too simplistic . . .

Jack Bog's Blog: Lifestyles of the Rich and Dead

The State Supreme Court threw out the state's estate tax. That's the tax that wealthy people have to pay when they die [. . . ]

I would throw this set of thoughts into the mix . . .

Steve -- one of our problems with school funding is that we keep raising the salaries for past work and appending that cost to today's budget. The tack-on amount is what . . . 36 percent for this coming year? That's enough to reduce class size by one-fourth, immediately.

Mark -- needs to learn the ethics of a simple poker game. Don''t bring too much money or too little money to the table. Too much money can be used to just raise raise raise until your opponent cannot match the bid. Too little money and the player is out on the first hand, which is no fun at all. Capitalism, to function properly, requires a playing field where things like production ingenuity or efficiency or a new and exciting product or service gets a chance to be rewarded.

In comparative economics it is looked at as dynamic efficiency. Yesterday's winners cannot hide and lock in their relative position forever but must put their money back on the table. The abandonment of enforcement of anti-monopoly laws has virtually destroyed the capitalist mechanism for cleansing the system of stale stuff, or stuffy individuals. (I should not have to babble about some old economists babbling about the tendency toward increasing concentration and centralization of power and wealth . . . which is just old news but still valid.)

Huge government debt is tied to the estate tax thing, in my opinion. Government bonds, from the perspective of a rich guy, are a holding pen that is free from the risk of capitalism. The rich don't want to play the game any more, they just want to hold on to their relative gains from some past adventure into the wild and threatening wilderness of capitalism. If we don't issue big bonds then there is nowhere for the rich to hide . . no place to hide from the risk of doing something stupid in the market place. I would prefer that we enforce pro-capitalist rules against unfair monopolistic practices and not allow rich folks to call “time-out” by having huge government bonds.

The estate tax is a band-aid to compensate for the lack of capitalism. Private property is just a necessary component to a greater vision of capitalism, it is not the holly grail over and above other components. A bigger vision of capitalism, a vision shared by all, is that it offers people the dream of using ones mental resources to one day become rich. (Whether one uses their riches to get even more or to be philanthropic is another matter.) The playing field cannot become so skewed as to eliminate the dream of the poor folks, or the system itself will collapse, and it will take with it the protection of private property.