The fullness of time  

What makes the estate tax so interesting, of course, is that it's about our mortality as much as it's about our money. Maybe this is obvious, but it strikes me that in the case of estates, people are amassing their fortunes with the specific goal of influencing events beyond their deaths -- seeking, in some fanatical capitalistic sense, immortality. And while calling it fanatical may be incendiary, and human nature obviously plays a role, there is something vaguely distasteful about it. Didn't Martin Luther's revolution involve just this sort of revulsion?

I'm not, of course, saying the earthly results of this behavior are always bad; in fact they're probably usually for the best. But at the same time, I don't see any reason why we should create a special incentive for people to use their wealth in this way. Yet this is exactly the state of things sans estate tax -- wealth transfers are taxed during our lifetimes, so by contrast not taxing them in death amounts to an incentive. IMHO, our tax policy should be abyss-neutral.