"If you've been working hard to ensure your wife and children don't want for anything in life, why in hell should the government take half of what you've earned

"If you've been working hard to ensure your wife and children don't want for anything in life, why in hell should the government take half of what you've earned and already paid taxes on?" To avoid the creation of an aristocratic class. The founding fathers had this specific aim in mind. Details here: http://budiansky.blogspot.com/2010/10/adam-smith-thomas-jefferson-and-other.html http://budiansky.blogspot.com/2010/10/adam-smith-thomas-jeff... A relevant quote from the article: [Thomas] Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death." The states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving expression to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that equality of citizenship was impossible in a nation where inequality of wealth remained the rule. North Carolina's 1784 statute explained that by keeping large estates together for succeeding generations, the old system had served "only to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic" and promoting "contention and injustice." Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast "tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic."