What people may do with what they have earned includes giving it away

The argument

The case against minimising inheritance begins with the earner rather than the heir. If a person's income is theirs, then so is the decision about what to do with the part they have not consumed, and giving it to the people they care about is among the most ordinary uses anyone makes of their own property. Proponents of this position argue that a tax or a cap aimed at bequests is therefore not a charge on a windfall but a restriction on what the earner may do with their own, imposed at the one moment when they cannot respond to it. Proponents add that providing for a family is a motive rather than a side effect. People take additional work, delay retirement, keep businesses going and accept risk partly in order to leave something behind, and a system that intercepts the result removes a reason for the activity that produced it. On this account the question is not only what happens to existing wealth but how much is created, and a policy aimed at equalising starts can leave less to go round. The position is usually paired with a distinction. Proponents accept that the state may tax, and many accept that very large concentrations of wealth raise problems of their own, while objecting to the specific aim of minimising inheritance in order to equalise starting positions. What they reject is treating the family as an obstacle to fairness. A parent helping a child is, on this view, not a distortion of a competition but one of the things people are working for, and a rule framed to prevent it asks them to be indifferent to their own children in a way no society has actually asked of anyone.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the ownership claim settles less than it appears to. All property rights are defined by rules, including rules about what may be transferred at death, so the question is what those rules should be rather than whether an existing entitlement is being infringed. They add that the appeal to motive is an empirical claim carrying a great deal of weight, since people save for security, status and their own old age as well as for heirs, and a charge on estates is not obviously the part of a tax system that discourages effort most. On the family point, critics argue that nobody proposes forbidding parents to help their children, only limiting the transfer of large fortunes, and the difference between the two is the whole of the policy.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] What a person may transfer at death is itself set by the rules of property, so the premise assumes the entitlement that is under discussion. [Rejecting P2] Saving is motivated by security, status and old age as much as by bequest, so a charge on estates need not reduce the activity that produced the wealth. [Rejecting P3] Limiting large transfers is compatible with parents helping their children, so the premise answers a stronger proposal than the one being made. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that a general prohibition on family transfers would be objectionable, not that inheritance should be left as it stands.