We can, I think, be confident that tonight’s debate will not revolve around the death tax, but Hillary Clinton’s proposal for a massive hike in the slice that this morbid levy takes from the (very) richest corpses (with smaller increases for those who haven’t done quite so well–or, indeed, not nearly as well) says something about her sense of justice that is worth noting, and not in the way she would want.

Writing for Law & Liberty, John McGinnis:

It is a theme of fiction: when someone dies, people line up to steal from him or her— estranged relatives and strangers alike. The deceased cannot protect himself. This is a reason that we should expect that death may be a time for the state to work some injustice too.
Thus, we should begin with a healthy suspicion of a tax levied at death. Hillary Clinton’s recent call for a 65 percent federal tax on large estates signals to Bernie Sanders supporters her left-wing bona fides, but it should signal to the rest of us her lack of a sense of justice. When one adds in taxation from states like New York, the government could then confiscate more than 4/5 of a decedent’s property.
To be sure, our basic intuitions about justice are often hard to justify, but there seems to be a large difference between taxing someone’s income at a reasonable rate and taking a large portion of their assets. We think of income as a flow, in which the government may dip, where assets constitute fixed bedrock and our own….
A secondary indication confirmatory of the injustice of Clinton’s proposal is that it would make the top rate of America’s estate tax the highest in the world by a substantial amount. Indeed, most industrialized nations have lower estate taxes than the United States has now.

It is, of course, no coincidence that the main winners from such taxes are the state and those who administer it.

But there’s something else too. Clinton’s proposed increases also send a clear message that it is better for the successful to, at some point, put splurging today ahead of construction for tomorrow and their generations to come.