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When There's No More Room in Trust Funds, the Dead Will Walk the Earth

The Medium Lobster is gladdened to see the House move towards permanently repealing the estate tax. The estate tax isn't just a wanton infliction of state violence upon Paris Hilton's God-given right to a tax-free mountain of money; it does not merely desecrate the solemnity of a loved one's stock portfolio; it is a dangerous regulation of the cosmic forces of Life and Death - and one that can only end in apocalyptic destruction.

As all bodhisattvas of the supply side understand, progressive income tax is an assault against entrepreneurship, taxing the wealthy at higher rates than the poor and therefore providing a disincentive to be rich. Indeed, we all remember the day Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, slouching in their tattered jeans and stained wife-beaters, announced their decision to quit their jobs and wallow in poverty rather than pay the terrible price of living in opulence. Even now America's homeless shelters are filled to bursting with dispirited, out-of-work billionaires - a humanitarian tragedy that the Democrats choose to overlook in their slavish subservience to Big Poor.

How much more dangerous, then, is the estate tax: a tax on death itself? For if income tax dissuades the living rich from being rich, then the death tax can only dissuade the dead rich from dying. Indeed, the more the government taxes our nation's most resourceful robber barons' estates upon their deaths, the greater incentive they have to not die at all - or worse, to rise from their graves and feast on the flesh of the living. Wandering the earth in endless, gnawing hunger, scattering brains and severing limbs, mindlessly devouring everything in their path: this is hardly a fate America can want for the most enterprising of the business elite. What, after all, would be left for their children to feed on?