Email to Michael Kinsley

Michael Kinsley wrote a column in today's Washington Post criticizing an attempt by a number of Demcrats and Republicans to scale back the estate tax. I sent the following email in response:

Mr Kinsley,

While you express puzzlement in today's column over opposition to the estate tax the logic is actually quite simple: people should be able to do with the money as they like. While you acknowledge this line of thinking, you then dismiss it by stating the following:

Perusing the Forbes 400 list of America's richest people, it's striking how few of them made the list by building the proverbial better mousetrap. The most common route to gargantuan wealth, like the route to smaller piles, remains inheritance. The ability to pass money along to your kids may motivate many a successful executive or investor to work harder, but it can't possibly motivate those kids to inherit harder in order to pass it along once again.

This is actually quite irrelevant. Whether their children work or not is no business of yours. If the rich decided to take the money, stack it in piles and have a great bonfire it should be their prerogative. It's a moral argument that you seem unable to comprehend. They earned it, it's theirs, and they should be able to do with it as they like. We don't need wisemen such as yourself to stand in judgement and decide if their plans for the money provide a sufficient social good or not.

Moving along, you then employ the following flimsy logic:

Dozens of Forbes 400 fortunes derive from the rising value of land or other natural resources. These businesses are fundamentally different from mousetrap building. Land does not need to become "better" to increase in value, and that value increase doesn't produce more land. Yet other fortunes depend directly on the government. The large fortunes based on health care and pharmaceuticals would not exist if not for Medicare and Medicaid. The government hands out large fortunes even more directly in forms as varied as cable-TV franchises; cellphone licenses; drilling, mining and mineral rights; minority small-business loans; and other special treatment.

Reading this it is rather apparent that you simply don't know what you are talking about. Land by itself is useless and remains so until someone builds something upon it or extracts a resource from it. Mineral and drilling rights aren't freely handed out, companies have to pay royalties on what is extracted. Just last year alone Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming pocketed a combined $2 billion in royalties. I realize that may not sound like a lot in the era of trillion dollar deficits, but that used to regarded as real money.

The government has similarly garnered hundreds of millions of dollars in cell phone licenses. This is common knowledge, and your refusal to acknowledge this fact in your column and instead present them as free gifts represents either profound ignorance or intellectual dishonesty.

I would also be happy to abolish programs such as Medicare/Medicaid and minority business loans to assuage your concerns there. It's deeply cynical to watch you advocate for the expansion of government through such programs and then cite their existence and distortions inflicted upon society as justification to reach ever deeper into the taxpayer's pockets.

Perhaps your most contemptible paragraph, however, is the penultimate one:

Most important, every American selling anything benefits from doing so in the world's richest market. An American doctor earns many times what the same doctor would earn in, say, India. This is not because he or she works many times harder. It's not even primarily because our government doles out hundreds of billions for health care each year. It's because we are a richer society, for reasons the American doctor had nothing to do with.

Really? NOTHING to do with? That's funny, because I have always been under the impression that doctors provide the nation's citizens with health care that allows them to carry on with their lives and produce the next generation of advancements that drives prosperity to ever greater heights. They are a small cog in the wheel that drives us ever forward. But maybe I am mistaken and our progress is simply a product of actions taken by our politicians and bureaucrats.

Lastly, let's turn this question on it's head. Rather than criticize those who think that the estate state should be severely curtailed or abolished, why don't you make the case for why it is desirable? For as far as I can tell it amounts to little more than "They've got it and I want it." I would strongly urge you to take some time and read the Constitution, for in it you will find little about the need for government to dispense social justice or tackle inequality. It's a fascinating document, and one that we ought to consider living by.

Regards,

Colin

I will of course update this with Kinsley's response if I receive one.