The government collects "revenue" to provide services. But because they have to win elections, all governments are obliged to keep taxes as low as possible, and ideally promise to cut taxes at election time. This in turn deprives essential services of adequate funding, and those that cannot afford the far more salubrious private school/health suck eggs. There should be steep progressive taxation during a person's life "and" death tax!
But there's really no point wasting words contra the kind of fawning, willing co-option the last few comments represent. The reason we have such gross disparities is because, astoundingly, the majority actually support it!
Try thinking outside the square (or preferably, outside Orwell's whale).
And it's no good blaming governments, any of them; they faithfully represent the people, indeed they are the people! They have no choice, they're in the business of winning elections. As long as the moronic majority (read ideologically obtuse) go on supporting a grossly unfair distribution of wealth, nothing will change.
And a big flipping raspberry to those blockheads who don't get it!

Squeers,

The reason that many inheritance taxes have been abolished or reduced to say 8% is that most of those that had money simply put structures in place to avoid paying them. Note Sweden abolshed them.

The rich and talented are extremely mobile and generally able to move to reside where ever the least tax is paid, and as tax is residence based, the gov gets 0% as Sweden discovered with its 90% super tax, and many of its best and brightest left.

Your question:" why should a rich kid, or old person, or anyone else with money, get a transcendentally more privileged education, or health care, or general leg-up than the poor demographic?"

So the rich spending money on improving the next generation is unfair as compared to what? Buying yachts? Australia's acedemic results are one of the highest in the world, largely subsidised by the private sector. Similarily the middle class is forced to buy private health cover by the state to subsidise the medicare system.

Many of the weathly don't send their kids to private schools, and many who do make huge sacrifices to do so, and resent the green eyed socialists that think it comes easily.

So fortunately all of the governments of a similar mind to you have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Upon death and inheritance, capital gains tax liability “crystalises”.

The value of the asset inherited is at its current value, not its purchased cost.

Any gain in that time essentially becomes liable as a capital gain, so a "de facto death duty" is collected by the avaricious state to squander on the idle and meaningless existence of the beneficiaries of handouts.

Arjay said the introduction of death duties will see an immediate flight of wealth into tax free safe-havens.

Too right.

But the real "loss" is through the flight of "energy, innovation and intellect", held within those people fleeing, who created the wealth they now defend, in the first place.

Additionally, the notion that you make the poor better off by taxing the wealthy is just another of the great big porky pies of socialism, the evidence of that is well documented through the deplorable social history and life quality experienced in many "socialist" states, around the world.

Fact: government is there to administer the minimum tax it needs to function.

It is not to protect the indolent and foolish from the consequences of their idleness and folly.

Wealth is best held and managed in the worthy hands of those who created it, not in the foolish hands of welfare recipients.

I'm beginning to suspect that you just say the first thing that comes into your head, PtB, without the slightest regard for accuracy.

If you get a notion that supports one of your own peculiar prejudices, you simply go ahead and blurt it out.

This is yet another prime example.

>>Death duties were originally designed to break up huge estates and give everyone a fair go,and avoid the aristocrat system established in England.<<

Utter tosh.

If you did even the most cursory research into the topic, you'd find that in 6 A.D., Augustus imposed a 5% inheritance tax - the vicesima heriditatium - and guess why he did so?

Not to "break up huge estates".

But to pay for his army.

(Source: "The age of Augustus" by Werner Eck, Deborah Lucas Schneider and Sarolta A. Takács)

Look it up if you don't believe me. It's on page 89.

Seriously, if you are going to make something up, you should at least make sure it can't be as easily refuted. You just look like a clown.

You then are in danger of becoming even more clownish, when you come out with stuff like this as a follow-up.

>>Death duties was a Christian thing, because we all believed once upon a time, that all property was vested in Almighty God, represented by Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, or whoever the Monarch was at the time, and that the Monarch/State had a claim to a share of it on the death of the subject<<

What utter twaddle.

By all means, find ways to express your disappointment with the world and its ways, and how it has been so mean to you and your law degree, and how the courts are illegitimate, and how Magna Carta rools ok.

But please, don't invent stuff, simply because you would like it to be that way.

It's. Just. Another. Tax.

And don't forget, there are many ways in which death duties, estate taxes and inheritance taxes can be legally circumvented. Just ask Gordon Brown. He's been wrestling with it for decades.

Well put col!

As for governments doing the best they can with what they have, which I think is your line of thought, gee wizz, I hope you're not reffering to 'anna lies' as her governement have wasted the best years of our lives considering the amount of 'win fall dollars' they received from the mining & property boom only to leave us 'high and dry'.

The bottom line is that if you tamper with the 'wealth creators' then they will simply go underground and we will all miss out.

Without buying into the ideological perspectives of some, I find myself persuaded by comments subsequent to my earlier post. Yes, it's just another tax, and those whom it would target would find ways around it anyway - possibly by taking all their money offshore, instead of investing a good proportion of it in Australia.

As for Peter the Babbler's strange argumentation, I think Pericles has nailed it (again).