What are you proposing to do with it when you're dead?
After all it's new income for them.
And if it did, then taxes would have been done a long time ago, because money in its endless circulation pays taxes all the time.
To emphasise this point, when an employer pays an employee wages, they pay it with a dollar that someone else earned (and paid tax on) and paid to them (and likely paid sales tax on). Money isn’t taxed, and neither are people; transactions are. An estate transfer is a transaction.
A house isn’t a person. Saying transactions, not people, are taxed doesn’t mean that only transactions are taxed.
* state sales sax on car * future city property tax on car * fed dividend tax on money used to pay for car * apple already paid state and fed corp income tax on money used to pay dividend * some person already paid income tax on money used to buy iphones/macs/chargers etc.
Is your position that the estate tax in particular is egregious or that all taxes are egregious? If you only want money to be taxed once then you'd have to redo all the taxes no?
If it is possible for taxation to be egregious, then at some point there must be a boundary which is crossed. How can we define what is a just amount of property to confiscate with our subjective judgment?
It is a moral issue in principle. In practice it amounts to whatever politicians can get away with. Ideologues present wealth as evidence of greed. Envy is celebrated. The person with a bigger slice of pie is blamed for other's perceptions of insufficient portions, as if markets represent a zero-sum game.
Cries of, "You didn't build that" are overly simplistic and misleading. If they were valid, collectives and central planners could produce surpluses without need for individualized incentives. Yet history tells us a different story.
That slice of pie which so many here seem unhappy with is much bigger than what was eaten in years before. This is the result of individual profit incentives, competition and innovation, not taxation or central planning.
If it is to be a moral issue, perhaps we should start from the point of not coercing others or violating their property rights?
> not coercing others or violating their property rights
Property rights always involve coercion, at least when you get beyond the basics of personal property. How does, say, Jeff Bezos own a variety of lavish properties across the country [1] when a half-million people in the US are homeless?
The short answer is that he depends on coercion. He expects that both private and state actors will coerce people into staying away from stuff he has claimed. Violently if necessary. And we're not even getting into the many flavors of coercion that underlie his enormous wealth.
The fundamentalist libertarian position always ends up in these sorts of incoherencies, because it makes ardent demands of a society it wants no part of otherwise.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-owns-five-massive...
As for Amazon, maybe look more closely at the government interventions in the financial markets. Yes, Bezos is an entrepreneurial figure. He is also symptomatic of an artificially supported economic system. The central bank injects liquidity. Financial markets acquire it first, and consumers are left with the inflation.
I would argue that large concerns like Amazon are enabled by the current paradigm. We could describe it as a tax by other means and price fixing of interest rates.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-borrows-%2410-billion...
As for libertarianism, observing that adds no more to the conversation than me calling you a socialist, statist or authoritarian.
Jokes aside, the rules of property are set up by society to encourage certain jointly beneficial outcomes. Money itself is an inherently social construct. (Imagine how far you'd get creating your own private currency that only you used.) And we are all temporary beings, here a little while and gone. Yes, some of the rules designate some of the property as yours to dispose of for the duration. Which is great! But make no mistake that these rules are contingent.
If tomorrow I hacked all the banks and land registries so I owned everything, people wouldn't say, "Well, I guess that's how it is now." The same is true if I did it technically within the rules. Everybody would make new rules. And they'd be right to. In the phrasing of James Carse, the current rules are the finite game, but like all finite games, the rules are generated by what he calls the infinite game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
Coinbase and other places seem to facilitate private currencies.
To me it's silly to see how much unused land there is in the USA but people aren't allowed to use it because a few people showed up 150 years ago and claimed it for themselves. And when they did they stole it from other people. Now people are just supposed to respect that forever?
The rule against perpetuities only prevents you from constructing a zombie legal entity which outlives you permanently. Some places have a fixed, high time limit; many merely have the non-onerous rule that you can only leave it to people who were alive at the time of your death.