The Difference Between Them and Us - Why They Hate the Estate Tax

I read with great interest and admiration David Seaton's post here: "Observations of and on the Rich".  Seaton contrasts the relatively modest and even awed reactions of some Americans to their financial success with the self-satisfaction and arrogance of others.  Seaton identifies correctly the latter group as the backbone of the reactionary movement that is destroying our world.  Seaton describes the neo-fascists as:

[P]eople who have more money than the average (or at least they imagine they do) . . . but they don't feel lucky... they feel that they have worked very, very, hard for every dime they have (perhaps they feel they have worked harder than they actually have) and being better off certainly has not sweetened their natures one bit. To see anyone receiving anything or even enjoying anything they haven't suffered to obtain offends them deeply (emphasis added).

Here I think that Seaton gets close to the dark heart of the right-wing movement but doesn't quite hit it.  For today's American extremist, riches, fame, and power aren't necessarily the hard-earned fruit of toil, they in and of themselves demonstrate the worth of their possessor.  In other words, accumulating or just having wealth doesn't just mean you possess valuable qualities like industriousness, self-sacrifice, and reliability.  Instead, great wealth quite simply confers superiority on its owner.  This explains why today's conservatives virulently oppose the estate tax. 

If the new right truly believed in rewarding hard work, ingenuity, and risk-taking, it would support taxing large estates, since the offspring of CEOs, entrepreneurs, and wildly successful entertainers are often lazy, without genius, and risk averse.  Rarely do these feckless children of great wealth, under any merit-based calculus, deserve the money that they will inherit.  But, the fact that they were born lucky is, for today's neo-con, proof that they are better than those who weren't, unless of course the scion is disinherited.

Why does the right-winger believe in the inherent superiority of all wealthy people - even those who clearly did nothing to earn their money?  There are two possibilities.  In Seaton's post, he describes the wife of his archetypical neo-con as "a religious nut job".  For her, the child born to great wealth is among the select.  God chose her and it would be sacrilegious for humans to "redistribute" wealth away from the select.  But, as Seaton points out, there are also non-religious right-wing crazies. 

So why do libertarians, "objectivists," and many other materialists hate the "estate tax"?  It's because they are social darwinists.  According to their view, children of the rich whose parents shower resources upon them are like lion cubs whose mother is the most successful antelope hunter.  Nobody expects lionesses to share with any cubs but her own.  To force her to would be unnatural and cruel just as forcing the wealthy to share their good fortune with the children of the less fortunate would, in the words of the right, be confiscation by the threat of violence.  An amoral universe which distributes resources unequally serves the same role for the right-wing religious skeptic as an omnipotent but frequently whimsical and even cruel god does for the religious conservative.  But in both camps, the possessors of great wealth are the fortunate, the chosen, the evolved.