>I actually think that's a class where a high inheritance tax would be most problematic. Do we want the government to suddenly gain controlling interests in Ama

>I actually think that's a class where a high inheritance tax would be most problematic. Do we want the government to suddenly gain controlling interests in Amazon or Google or any other massive private enterprise? Absolutely, yes! The whole point of a publicly-traded corporation is that the company is owned by lots of different people, not just one person. If one person owns most of the stock in a company that large, then they're doing something wrong. Having a high inheritance tax for billionaires would be good this way, by making them think twice about hoarding all that stock. With a normal huge corporation in this scenario, it would take a bunch of people all dying at once for the government to suddenly gain a controlling interest. I'm not sure about Amazon, but I'm pretty sure Google is not more than 50% owned by one person. >That an inheritance tax alone doesn't result in perfectly equitable wealth distribution doesn't mean there's any problem with it - it would certainly be more equitable than not having inheritance tax. I don't see how it's really equitable at all, unless you restrict it to truly wealthy people, so that you avoid family dynasties from happening and continuing for generations. For middle-class people (who these days really do not have that much wealth), I don't see how this benefits society at all. Also, you never addressed my question about how you handle gifts. This is typically how extremely wealthy people get around a lot of inheritance tax today. (Remember, we do have an inheritance tax now, and it only applies to multimillionaires IIRC. And they typically get around it with trusts, giving it to their kids before they die, etc.)