Left-wing Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky today took to his keyboard to hack out a defense of the federal estate tax. Tomasky insisted taxation-without-respiration is "moral" and, what's more, agreeable to the Founding Fathers.
Tomasky insisted taxation-without-respiration is "moral" and that opposition to taxing the wealthiest estates in the land is "un-American" because it supposedly violates the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and Scottish economist Adam Smith, two heroes of Tea Party conservatives (emphasis mine):
The conservative position here is not only immoral. It’s un-American, and explicitly so. Our Founding Fathers, as a group, loved inheritance taxes. Loved them. And it stands to reason—they were founding a nation that would throw off the old weights and chains of Europe. Those weight and chains very much included laws of primogeniture and inheritance that resulted in all those layabout royals and their massive estates. America, they vowed, would not be like that. Social position would be earned, not inherited.
And so no less a figure than TJ himself led the fight in the Virginia legislature in 1777 to abolish primogeniture laws. Jefferson even went so far as to wonder whether all rights of inheritance should be abolished and most property basically reshuffled every 50 years. We didn’t do that of course, but every revolutionary state government followed Virginia’s lead.
So the conservative position is immoral and un-American. It’s also un-conservative. I say this because well, on matters economic, who is the conservatives’ great hero? Maybe Hayek. But he’s like the Lebron. The Jordan is still Adam Smith. And Adam Smith believed in taxing huge wealth. He wrote this: “A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fullness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural. There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death.”
No right to bind it up from posterity. No right. Get it?
Of course, by that logic, why should the political and moral sentiments of long-dead individuals -- those prescriptions and proscription in themselves a sort of intellectual property -- bind posterity by being ossified forever in a U.S. tax law? What's liberal about that?
What's more, Tomasky failed to establish that either Jefferson or Smith actually favored using the heavy hand of government, through the tax code, to engineer society as they see fit.
Indeed, when you read the full context of Smith's comments on inheritance of property, it seems Smith was concerned with bequeathing property of an individual to generations which are yet unborn at the time of the property owner's death. Smith's concern -- click here to read the relevant portion --seems to be in agricultural lands lying fallow and undeveloped, unproductive for being tied up for seemingly interminable periods of time until the age of majority of the eventual heir. Smith's concern isn't with the government receiving revenue per se or with a great distribution of wealth among the masses but rather with fostering great economic productivity by freeing up agriculturally-suited land for purchase by a new owner who would be more likely to cultivate it.
As for the abolition of primogeniture in Jefferson's Virginia and in other states like Georgia, all this entailed was a change in how probate judges would divide property among heirs for the estate of a person who died intestate (without a last will and testament). Under primogeniture, the firstborn son was entitled to the lion's share of such property. Abolishing primogeniture and the related common-law protection of "entails" simply meant a more even distribution of property among a decedent's wife and children in the event he died without a last will and testament to guide the court in overseeing disposition of property.
The Founding generation wisely kept the sanctity of last wills and testaments and the passing down of property to heirs. There is a certain small-R republican virtue in working hard, enjoying the fruits of one's labor, and laying up an inheritance to bless one's children and children's children. It's eminently biblical, moral, and conservative. And perhaps that's why it's completely alien to the mind of Michael Tomasky.
