Founders and enlightnment (and Obama) against inherited wealth

Founders and enlightnment (and Obama) against inherited wealth

" President Barack Obama is proposing new taxes on the wealthiest Americans that would limit their profits from investments and make it harder for them to pass assets to heirs." (click here).

At the onset of Obama's new proposal of Estate tax.

Obama proposes a new estate tax... from the Bloomberg article, "Obama Proposes New Tax Hikes on Wealthy to Aid Middle Class ." Saying "He would increase the top tax rate on capital gains and dividends to 28 percent from 23.8 percent. The rate was 15 percent when Obama took office in 2009, meaning that he's proposing to almost double it over his two terms in office.
In the article.. "YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU'.And in the ECONOMIST by Lexington, (his'Liberal Curmudgeon's friend' strtikes again, according to him)."If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on -- and those guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most definitely do not -- it was the incompatibility of democracy and inherited wealth." (http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_and_founding_fathers) -- see hold article.
Adam Smith, the Libertatian's Mentor, argument against the Estate tax...

"A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness 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." Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death."

And further.. Smith and Thomas Jefferson,...both,, agreed, "Thomas Paine, like Smith and Jefferson, made much of the idea that landed property itself was an affront to the natural right of each generation to the usufruct of the earth, and proposed a "ground rent" -- in fact an inheritance tax -- on property at the time it is conveyed at death " e.g. Estate tax.

F rom another source, ( www.law.csuohio.edu/faculty/wilson/index.html) we find again the Founders supported a progressive, estate tax,"The taxation power was a major part of their analysis. The leading members of that generation agreed with Adam Smith that proportional taxation was permissible, even desirable. Thomas Jefferson thought the silent tool of progressive taxation would stabilize the republic by preventing the wealthy from becoming a tyrannical aristocracy. Jefferson and Madison led the movement to eliminate primogeniture and entail, because those two doctrines of wealth transfer at death kept property in too few hands. " (Abstract)
By the way, "usufruct'... means, " the right of enjoying all the advantages derivable from the use of something that belongs to another, as far as is compatible with the substance of the thing not being destroyed or injured" (Dictionary.com)

Read on, I rest my case.