Wealth should be built on EARNINGS, not inheritance. What did his kids do to deserve that land any more than anyone else?
I'm not sure how much you know directly about farming, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that the children of
farmers grow up working on those farms with their parents. The idea that they inherit said farms without having
earned them is only slightly less preposterous than your idea, when all is said and done, that a man or woman
has or should have no implicit right to decide where their money and property go after their deaths no matter
to whom they choose to give it.
By granting those kids a free farm (valued in the millions of dollars) you damn everyone else around them!
Damn them to
what---the prevention of appropriation by theft so that they might maybe get a small sliver of the
appropriation in one or another government benefit?
Keeping a family farm in the family---or anything
else a man or woman decides should be kept in the family,
including their monetary wealth, in whatever volume---damns
no one. The State should not have the first right to
what men and women earn even after their deaths. They should, I repeat, have the right to decide who gets it and
how much of it. The inheritance tax robs them of that right just as surely as the income tax robs them of the right
to make the first call on how they should or shouldn't spend the money they earn.
We could kick around all day how many people abuse their inheritances or at least fail to build upon them, but
that doesn't mean the State ought to have the right to decide for them what their inheritances shall or shall not
do. It's a variation on the argument Albert Jay Nock translated from what he saw (properly) as the metastasis
of State power and the contraction of individual and proper social power, the State saying, in effect,
You have
not used your social power in the manner I see fit so I shall take it from you and exercise it as I believe fit.