A contemporary person of enormous fortune, Warren Buffett, is perhaps the greatest defender of the inheritance tax today. His biographer, Roger Lowenstein, relates the following story about Buffet’s position. “Once, at a Q & A at Cap Cities, Buffett was asked how he would rewrite the tax code. ‘If I really could do it, it would shock you,’ he said. He’d tax the hell out of personal consumption – at progressively higher rates – and impose an ‘enormous’ inheritance tax.”

On another occasion, when asked what the right amount to leave one’s children was, Buffett retorted, “a few hundred thousand ought to do it.” And he sticks to his word. He never gives his own children more than the gift exclusion amount every Christmas – currently $10,000 (indexed for inflation). And he plans on leaving the lion’s share of his fortune to the Buffett Foundation.

Buffett’s critique of inherited wealth is reminiscent of Thomas Paine’s acid-penned diatribes. To quote Buffet: “The DuPonts might believe themselves perceptive in observing the debilitating effects of food stamps for the poor, but were themselves living off a boundless supply of privately funded food stamps. . . . The idea that you get a lifetime of food stamps based on coming out of the right womb strikes at my idea of fairness.”

Like Paine, Buffet argues that if talent can’t be passed down to later generations, neither should money. “Warren explained that if he were the quarterback of the Nebraska football team it wouldn’t be fair of him to pass down the job to a son or daughter, and that he felt the same about his money.”

Over a two-hundred-year history, estate tax proponents have focused on two arguments: the fairness issue (inherited wealth is not fair to the poor) and the productivity issue (inherited wealth is not beneficial for its recipients). Recent empirical studies have confirmed the productivity argument. In The Millionaire Next Door, researchers Thomas Stanley and William Danko conclude that lifetime and testamentary family gifts are both a disincentive to work as well as a disincentive to save. Their findings show that the more dollars adult children receive, the fewer they accumulate, while those who are given fewer dollars accumulate more.

Furthermore, they find that the giving of such gifts (which the authors call “economic outpatient care”) is the single most significant factor that explains the lack of productivity among the adult children of the affluent. Their advice: teach your children to achieve, not just to consume. Stanley and Danko propose a declaration of independence for children of the affluent akin to the one Thomas Paine proposed for the American offspring of the British.

While ethical arguments and empirical studies may not prove ultimately persuasive in the current acrimonious debate over estate tax reform, at the very least the words of these patriots and capitalists provide an interesting historical perspective.