As a lawyer, I spent a good part of my career helping people and families transfer wealth from one generation to the next in the most wholesome way possible. Though I’m not quite a specialist, this gave me some insight into estate tax system, why it doesn’t work, and what we should do with it.

As Americans, we are born into a state of liberty, meaning we have self-ownership and the freedoms to voluntarily exchange our labor for property and that property for other property as we see fit. The mix of property that we own when we, as P. G. Woodehouse wrote, “turn in our dinner pail” is our estate. When smart, hardworking (and lucky) Americans do this for a few decades, those estates can become quite large.

Teddy Roosevelt (prep school, Harvard, Columbia) inherited such an estate, freeing him to pursue unproductive activities full-time. This, oddly, led him to believe that allowing very productive individuals to pass on large estates to their children leads to a dangerous concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. The estate tax started out modestly enough, went up and down during and after World War I, until another patrician Roosevelt (prep school, Harvard, Columbia) came along. Roosevelt and his New Deal Democrats blamed the Great Depression on a conspiracy of rich people, and they have been doing it ever since.