Estate of Mind

Recently my expressed view on the inheritance tax controversy was characterized as “Marxist”. Such a characterization was par for the course at the self-identified conservative site where such a claim is emblematic of the settled and superficial thought of many the site’s participants whom I in turn characterize as “Cliff Note conservatives” – they know the broad outline and key phrases of the ideology, but are mostly proficient in parroting a party line they imprudently assume is so substantial, explicatory, and inclusive of the totality of the human, political, and economic conditions, their own intellectual exercises are superfluous. They are content that their views are congruent with those of the societal elites, consequently elevating themselves by association, and making any critical examination of the propositions intellectually irrelevant. Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge in their paper, “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs” articulated the phenomena thusly, “Many form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. Elites form their political belief dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. The masses’ strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elite’s strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts or arguments to emphasize or ignore”. Their and my opinions may be supported by an assessment of the “facts” and “preconceived prejudices” used by the lay conservative poseurs in their inheritance tax misapprehension.

The initial confusion lay in the belief that our nation was founded as a capitalistic society. The United States of America was founded as a republic, not as a capitalistic society. Capitalism, a system and “imaginary machine” derives its freedom of operating characteristics in this society from the American ethos, rather than freedom deriving from the ethos of capitalism. That is not a subtle, but a significant distinction. The American ethos and capitalism are not one and the same. They are co-existing political and economic philosophies, sometimes, but not always, complementary. But only one was ratified and legally memorialized by the body politic in the Constitution. And the thoughts of various important players in the creation and development of the American and modern western ethos concerning wealth and inheritance, which can be discovered in a cursory search of the internet, offer if nothing else, an opportunity to contrast alternative opinions with the facts and arguments that our present day elite choose to emphasize or ignore for their own particular benefit.

I am often confronted by those aforementioned “Cliff Note conservatives” with the most ubiquitous and popular quotations of Adam Smith. The use of a few selected sentences to contextualize Smith’s work in a way to make him an ally of capitalism as practiced in the twentieth century, which in many respects he wouldn’t recognize, and in many areas would abhor, is similar to memorizing only the opening lines of Act Three, Scene One, to claim expertise of Hamlet. When they appeal to Smith to justify the transfer of vast fortunes from the dead to the living by some man-made machination, uninterrupted by death, allowing continued right of ownership, control, or disposition of vast wealth or real property across generations, they will be disappointed. Smith concurred with the opinion that “the earth belongs usufruct to the living”. He said it was “the most absurd of all suppositions that every successive generation not have an equal right to the earth”. Apparently to Smith, often the good is, and most times the wealth of men should be, interred with their bones.

Another notable figure, Thomas Jefferson in 1777, considering the same subject posited, “A power to dispose of estates forever 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”.

A few years later in 1784, North Carolina, that bastion of liberalism, enacted a statute addressing the keeping of large estates together for multiple generations. They felt this system, “only served to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic”.

More contemporary figures, Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, also had views on the subject. Theodore Roosevelt opined that the transmission of vast wealth to the young, “does not do them any real service and is a great and genuine detriment to the community at large”. FDR felt, “The transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance, or gift is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people. Inherited economic power is as inconsistent with the ideals of this generation as inherited political power was inconsistent with the ideals of the generation which established our government”.

Others giving thought to this matter, taking into consideration the emotional attachment parents have for their children’s welfare, have suggested that wealth and advantage possessed by parents would best be used to provide their children with the best educational and social preparation, so they may obtain by their own effort, rewarding and satisfying lives and employment, which further allows and encourages a virtuous society where social privilege is earned rather than inherited. This process, to some, is most compatible with, and best serves to reify the republican archetype.

The casuistry leading to the opinions conveyed above, in my estimation don’t portray any Marxist evil, but serves as a litmus of the contrived zeitgeist of contemporary American society where the tautology of conservative rhetoric has consecrated economic capitalism as ‘sacred’ and demoted republican ideals to subservient secularism. This is reinforced by the observation that the accepted sociology of the inheritance tax has been part of our established financial convention for several generations, and consequently it is bewildering that those contemporary lay conservatives, loudly claiming “old school” values, have suddenly been provoked to scorn this particular component of “tradition”. This position on inheritance tax, as with the extension of the Bush tax cuts, could allow the induction that by way of calculated sophistry large portions of the middle class have been induced to act again, incomprehensively, against their own interest, in favor of the wealthy. What other conclusion can be drawn considering the social cautions already voiced, together with the fact that any individual or any estate within the parameter of the “middle class” will not be subject to any inheritance tax under the current proposal or even reversion to the Clinton era level? What magic pill has been swallowed that makes the middle class so inclined, philosophically and statutorily, to accept an additional sacrifice for the wealthy, in return for a mere insinuation of accidental, unintentional reciprocity?

By declining to embrace the traditional republican ethos regarding wealth naturally alienated by death, and acquiescing in this process allowing the privileged to retain substantial privilege and power after death, the greater part of society are only condemning their own children to social and ultimately political disadvantage. If the 16th Amendment of the Constitution, duly ratified by the people, allows Congress “ to lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived”, what is the rationale for un-defining or downgrading inheritance, at a level the society reasonably and mutually designates as “wealth”, as taxable income? Maybe the masses, as Taber and Lodge suggest, are in fact avoiding truth by making a low investment in understanding their own interest, and the aspiration of republican society. They’re being conditioned to think only as capitalists, and less like Americans. The former and latter are not perfectly synonymous, and only one gets advantage from the misunderstanding.