What Libertarians (Should) Think About Inheritance Taxation

Bibliographic Data

ID12568326
AuthorsMarcel Twele (0000-0002-2524-1244, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume29
Issue1
Pages89-110
Publication date2022-09-05
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueRes Publica. Revista de Historia de las Ideas Politicas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1576-4184 • E-ISSN: 1989-6115
PublisherSpringer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1007/s11158-022-09562-3
OpenAlexW4294637040
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited24

Recently, there has been an effort to make libertarianism compatible with a redistributive inheritance tax: When the tax is levied, the taxpayer in question is already dead and as such she cannot be a bearer of rights. The state is therefore allowed to redistribute the (value of) the estate according to some distributive principle. I consider (and finally dismiss) four successive arguments, each concluding that the state is allowed to use the estate for redistributive purposes. I show that neither of them is able to reconcile (right-) libertarianism with a redistributive inheritance tax. Instead of trying to square the circle, proponents of such a tax should meet the theoretical essentials of (right-) libertarianism head-on

Direct tax · Double taxation · Economics · Estate · Gift tax · Inheritance (genetic algorithm · Inheritance tax · Law and economics · Libertarianism · Political science · State (computer science · State income tax · Tax reform · Taxpayer · Value (mathematics · Law · Legal and Constitutional Studies · Legal principles and applications · Political Philosophy and Ethics

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