This story comes to us from Britain, but it so neatly encapsulates leftwing thinking that I wanted to make note of it:

The estate tax was the most progressive part of the American tax system, because it rested on the principle that the wealthy few, if they were not willing to bequeath their money to charity, should not be permitted to pass it all directly to their heirs.

The author of the piece is David Runciman and he is reviewing the book Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth, which details the battle to repeal the "death tax" (called the inheritance tax in Britain) in the United States. Don't you just love the way Runciman frames it? Is that not just the perfect distillation of leftwing thought? If "the rich" (as defined, of course, by leftwingers) don't want to donate what the leftwing thinks sufficient to the poor, then they should be forced to do so via inheritence taxes...there's your leftwing mindset in a nutshell. Get it? What you own is not actually yours, but just lent to you by the Super State and you'd better damn well do as they wish with it or they'll do it for you.

What the left does not and seemingly will not understand is that, at least in America, we don't envy the rich...at most, we're periodically annoyed with them when they do something stupid in public, but we're not lying awake at night worried that Bill Gates has too much money. Nor do we worry that he's not using it in a manner we think fit. Its his money, you see? And if he wants to leave it to his children, then that is his business.

While the left thinks it monumentally unfair that a man should leave his property to his children, we think it unfair that children should be robbed because some leftwing elitist somewhere has a pet welfare scheme to be funded...

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