On the Right - Capitalist Unction.(reaction to proposed estate tax changes by wealthy people)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 16

Well, catch Warren Buffett! He is worried that the estate tax might be eliminated. Mr. Buffett, who is reported to be the fourth richest man in America, isn't going to wait for Congress to take his advice to maintain the tax. He will do it himself! For himself! He has told the awaiting world that he intends to leave his own children only "a pittance." It is wonderful how, faced with the current challenge, he can cope with such mature decisiveness over his own affairs: give his children a pittance and leave the rest of his estate to be taxed by the government. Indeed, he can go further. One motive for his stand against the repeal of the death tax is his concern for private charities. Well, he can deed all of his estate to private charity. Once again, he is demonstrating sovereignty over his own affairs.

There is the problem that this does not satisfy him, not by any means. He wishes not only to restrict his children to a pittance, and to dispatch his earnings to the government and to private charity. He wishes that others should do so. He wishes to make his preferences a matter of law, enforceable even on others who have different priorities.

And he is not alone in the pleading to derail the movement to end the estate tax. He is garishly accompanied by 120 of the super-wealthy in America. They include: George Soros, who got there by selling the British pound short a dozen years ago, without marked concern for those poor people who held their savings in pounds they thought durable in value; and without high scorn for government policies whose fiscal and monetary policies had the effect of a capital levy on everyone who owned a pound. Debauching the currency, Lord Keynes acknowledged, only governments can do; David Rockefeller, protesting a return to the tax code that gave the Rockefellers their great launch in life (Mr. Rockefeller has been an exemplary citizen, with only the one reservation, that he is often eager to contrive for government to appropriate the savings of non-Rockefellers). Also William Gates the First, who was wealthy even before William the Second conquered the entire world. He is concerned that the elimination of the death tax would do two things: straiten the returns of ...