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July 2, 2006
by Rabbi Daniel Lapin
As worthy as Buffett's charity is, I disagree with the professor when he argues that failure to put the public welfare ahead of family is just another form of nepotism. Professor Tiger feels that just as it would be wrong for Warren to give a plum Berkshire Hathaway job to a favorite, but incompetent nephew, it would be wrong for him to leave his wealth to his family rather than to all of society. And how does the good professor suggest that we leave our wealth to all of society? Through the death tax, that is how. The government should act as the agent for all of us by seizing the assets of the departed. Maybe I'm just odd but my personal view is that if an agent is absolutely necessary, I'd prefer one that takes a lower commission. Tiger supports the death tax by saying, "Should income my children receive from me after I board my flight to the hereafter be treated differently than what they earn working at Sears or Mittal Steel? Does death endow particular assets with a special immunity from public scrutiny?" Nobody is pleading for secrecy. It is not a case of immunity, but of family. Suppose that a father, fueled by love for his family, devotes a lifetime to his job. Instead of taking lavish vacations, he saves and invests so that his sons and daughters will one day be able to move on up. He accumulates wealth and after he dies he bequeaths his estate to his children. It makes perfect sense that to a Darwinian anthropologist, this inheritance possesses no emotional freight. However, I disagree. The money his children inherit is not the same as money they might earn at their own jobs. It is family money on which income tax has been paid and should be outside the reach of government. Imagine I remove twenty dollars from my pants pocket and place it in the wallet I carry in my jacket. Obviously the government gets no share of that transfer. I can keep the government at bay even if I transfer a thousand dollars from my savings account to my checking account. Things begin to change if I hand over some money to you. You'd have to declare it to the government as income, or perhaps a gift. The same thing would apply were I to give an attractive young woman a hundred dollars. The government would reach for its share from her and it might arrest me. However, our society still recognizes a married man and woman to be something very special. A married couple provides a vital service to our society by functioning as one unit. That is why for tax purposes, the government rightly still recognizes a married couple as a single unit. Thus, if it turns out that the attractive young woman to whom I handed over the money is my wife; the government must withdraw its grasping hand and ignore the transaction. Now the question is what about the children of that marriage. Are they additional elements in the impregnable fortress of that family unit or are they merely little strangers, indistinguishable from all the other children in America? If the former, it is similar to moving money from one pocket to another and the government has no business reaching out for any share of the transfer. If, however, children all belong to the village that raised them (though the village conveniently assigns the cost of putting a roof over their heads and food in their bellies to parents) then surely it is just plain wrong to favor the children of the departed over all other children. What it all boils down to is this: Are we humans nothing but sophisticated chimpanzees or are we a unique species touched by the finger of God? If we are just smart animals, we have no special relationship with our children other than a superficial biological one. To once again quote the Darwinian Tiger, we must "repudiate the notion that what is mine remains mine and my family's." After all, what dog or giraffe retains a long term affiliation with its parents? The answer is that none does. Once the child has attained biological independence, the relationship is over. No four year old cat, cow, or kangaroo recognizes its mother, let alone its father. Other than a longer period of biological dependency, people are exactly the same. Thus, when a person dies, his assets should belong to all of society. (Government will handle the details, thank you.) If, on the other hand, we are a unique species endowed with a soul by our Creator, then everything about us is different from animals. Chief among the differences is the concept of family which the Bible codifies by very explicit laws of inheritance. In this model my children are, like my wife, part of me and out of government's reach. For the government to grab money that a father conveys to his children, either before or after his death, is as unconscionable as seizing a share of the housekeeping money that a husband deposits into his wife's bank account. There are other clues that Mr. Tiger offers to his philosophical and religious world view, let alone to his, shall we politely say, eccentric view of economics. For instance, he quaintly suggests that you ought to give your money away either to others or to government because what comes from society should stay in society. In other words, your wealth is not the result of you serving society but somehow, and perhaps not altogether fittingly, it got mistakenly transferred from society to you. That money you hold yearns to return to where it belongs--to society. But enough of the fun. I accept that some Americans believe in the power of government while other Americans, sharing the trepidation of the Founders, view government with caution. They know that most of what government promises is often at the expense of freedom. Just two years ago in a keynote address for the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Senator Barack Obama said, "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America." Well, maybe Senator Obama doesn't like the terms liberal and conservative, but you can call it what you like. You might say red and blue. Or you could say those who worship regularly and those who don't. The bottom line is that there are indeed two Americas. There is an America in favor of almost limitless abortion and there is an America that chooses newborn life. There is an America in favor of homosexual marriage and there is an America that chooses traditional family life. There is an America that believes that only government can help provide us with what we need to live out the American dream and there is an America that believes that family does that job. Just like the rest of us, Barack Obama is not always wrong, but neither is he always right. This time he was wrong. There are two Americas, and what divides them is not race, class, or gender, or any other tired Marxist anachronisms. What divides America is no more and no less than the role of Judeo-Christian values. One part of America sees traditional family as sacrosanct and loathes the death tax as a secular force eroding the special bond between parents and their children. The other part of America sees people through the lens of Darwinian anthropology. In this view, family is an artificial and primitive human construct whose time is over. One way of hastening its demise is destroying the economic bond between generations just as government welfare helped damage the bond between so many mothers and the fathers of their children. Credit should go to Warren Buffett for his unprecedented gift. He was right to make the gift but he is wrong in his support of Planned Parenthood. Professor Tiger was right to praise Buffett's free-will gift. He was wrong to advocate the death tax and recommend that government withhold from all Americans the same freedom of decision enjoyed by Buffett, namely either to give your money to strangers or to your own family.
Radio talk show host, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, is president of Toward Tradition, a bridge-building organization providing a voice for all Americans who defend the Judeo-Christian values vital for our nation's survival. Visit their website at http://www.towardtradition.org. © 2005 by Rabbi Daniel Lapin and reproduced here with permission.
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No
one is always wrong, and as much as we might want
our children to think so, neither is anyone always
right. That sort of omniscience is reserved for
God. The rest of us are sometimes right and
sometimes wrong. Take Mr. Tiger, the eponymously
named Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers
University. He was right when he argued in his book
"The Decline of Males" that many single mothers
find government welfare to be a more reliable
partner than the absent men who fathered their
children. But he is wrong in his Wall Street
Journal article this week in which he drew a
strange conclusion from Warren Buffett's decision
to give away over $30 billion this summer.
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