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AbstractImagine two friends. Anna inherits nothing and works for every penny she has, while Mary inherits millions. How should a world that respects individual autonomy and private property rights treat Anna's earnings and Mary's inheritance? Should it tax them the same, or tax one more heavily than the other? If the latter, which one? The conventional wisdom holds that although some "right" libertarian theories justify taxing income, none justify taxing inheritances. Such taxes are "expropriations" and "an especially cruel injury" that "run[] roughshod over [a] deceased's interest in the ends his property will serve." This essay explores the standard libertarian objections to taxing gifts and bequests and argues that libertarians overstate their case when distinguishing the taxation of gratuitous transfers from other types of taxation. At minimum, the benefit theory of taxation embraced by many minimal statists and classical liberals mandates that the receipt of gifts and bequests should be taxed to the recipient. Moreover, the goals of curbing inherited political power and preventing wealthy families from insulating their members from market competition provide two additional explanations for why taxing inheritances to recipients is compatible with classical liberal values.

The current estate tax raises little revenue, yet is ill designed to further the social goals used to justify it. This Article takes one frequently mentioned goal—minimizing dynastic wealth transfers—and explores what insights focusing on that objective yields for the design of the transfer tax system. It starts from the premise that what renders dynastic wealth transfers problematic is that such transfers can bestow upon the recipient unearned political and economic power, which contravenes the democratic ideal that power should be earned, not inherited. Under this view, the tax system should be concerned with neither the build-up of wealth per se nor transfers of wealth that are not large enough to bestow power upon the recipient. Instead, the tax system should be concerned only with transfers of wealth large enough to confer economic and political power on the recipient. The structure that best reflects this concern is a progressive cumulative accessions tax that focuses on the recipient, instead of an estate tax that focuses on the transferor. Each recipient should have an extremely high exemption amount, given that receiving a few hundred thousand or couple million dollars does not give one power. Lastly, there should be no generation-skipping penalty, because what matters is how many individuals have the ability to use the power accompanying the wealth.

Despite libertarianism's political popularity, tax scholarship is largely silent about the interaction between libertarian principles and the structure of our tax system. To fill that gap, this Article mines the nuances of libertarian theory for insights into one feature of our tax system—the charitable tax subsidies—and finds some surprising insights. Although one strand of libertarianism suggests that charitable tax subsidies are in and of themselves illegitimate, several other understandings of libertarianism see a role for the state to engage in a varying amount of redistribution or to provide varying amounts of public goods. Surprisingly, some readings even lend weight to the common criticism that the charitable tax subsidies do not do enough to assist the poor and disadvantaged. Only a lenient interpretation of classical liberalism that conceives of a vibrant non-profit sector as a public good in and of itself and an expansive reading of left-libertarianism support something akin to our current structure, in which elite cultural institutions such as the opera are subsidized even if they provide no free or discounted services to the poor. In addressing these questions, this Article rounds out a series on the interaction of distributive justice and the charitable tax subsidies.

Universal Basic Income is one of the most talked-about ideas of the 21st century. The motivating idea is simple: give people cash and let them do whatever they want with it. But below the surface of this simplicity lurk a number of challenging questions. How much would a UBI cost? Who would be eligible to receive it? Would it discourage work? Would it contribute to inflation? This book provides an objective, expert guide to these and many other questions about the UBI.