Legal Affairs – Now Here’s A Cause: Those Poor, Poor Rich Folks

National Journal

Listening to the Republican rhetoric, you might get the idea that making children of wealth work for a living is a radical, confiscatory assault on family farms, property rights, fairness, and the American way. In one of countless screeds in The Wall Street Journal, Melik Kaylan, of Forbes.com, likened the idea of taxing inherited wealth to "the Maoist notion of `perpetual revolution,’ where every generation must embrace the struggle anew," and noted approvingly that "the Renaissance was built on a society of dynastic privilege." Less-extravagant critics denounce what they call the "death tax" as a manifestation of class warfare.