Perhaps if Teddy had experienced Carnegie’s largesse he would have liked him more. Roosevelt admired Carnegie’s principles, but personally never got along well with him. And as for Thomas Paine, Roosevelt in typical hyperbole once referred to him as a “filthy little atheist.” (Paine was in fact a deist.) However, the Rough Rider was an avid proponent of Paine’s and Carnegie’s commitment to the inheritance tax.

Being a member of the equestrian class himself, Roosevelt paid dearly for his ideas. In a letter to Marshall Stinson, he lamented: “The great bulk of my social friends violently disagree with me on this point. Now I do not intend to refuse to associate with them because of this disagreement, nor yet to give up my own views on the subject.”

Roosevelt formally proposed a federal inheritance tax in a message to Congress on December 4, 1906. His reasoning is quite different from Carnegie’s. Carnegie thought that the wealthy had a particular obligation to the poor. Roosevelt thought that the wealthy had a special obligation to the government itself. “The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.” The wealthy individual needs to pay for the “protection” that the State provides for his or her property ¾ a military force that defends private property from foreign threat and a legal system/police force that protects private property from domestic theft. Roosevelt is echoing Adam Smith’s observation in the Wealth of Nations: “It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of valuable property can sleep a single night in security.”

Like all of the other members of the estate tax Mount Rushmore club, Roosevelt had no intentions of taxing small estates. “It is most desirable to encourage thrift and ambition, and a potent source of thrift and ambition is the desire on the part of the breadwinner to leave his children well off. This object can be attained by making the tax very small on moderate amounts of property.” Roosevelt’s estate tax was aimed at enormous fortunes like those of the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors and Morgans.