> Inheritance taxes should be high, without being overly punitive

What's strange is that when you talk to people about inheritance tax they become instantly outraged at the idea of the government taking their money by force, yet they seem to have no problem with the government forcibly taking close to half of their salary.

It's a strange paradox and it seems that people just aren't used to the idea, despite it being much fairer. Tax the wealth of the dead rather than the earnings of the living.

If we could slash income tax in half but implement an inheritance tax of, for example, 50% above a certain threshold, it would be a win-win for everyone. The rich would still leave lots of money to their kids and the average person would get to keep more of their earned money. It's more meritocratic on every level.

Sadly, so many of our leaders now are very wealthy themselves, so this isn't a proposition they're likely to be enthusiastic about.

This sentence is so bizarre not even the opposite is correct. First off, 'effective leaders and managers' isn't an antonym to 'bureaucrat'. There are effective leaders and managers in bureaucracies. In fact that's kind of what bureaucracy means, effective and rational management of resources.

Furthermore, bureaucracies exist both in the private sector and public sector. Wealthy billionaires employ hundreds (if not more) of individuals doing nothing but managing their wealth in highly bureaucratic fashion. They don't run around and employ their billions in some sort of crazy act of pizza and dorm-room fuelled creative destruction, the deploy countless of institutions and non-profits and accountants and lawyers, the gates foundation looks more like the tax office or a defense department than a garage workshop.

>, or give people with a proven track record more resources to devote to new enterprises

No, the point of capitalism is to allocate capital to people who don't have any proven track record. Because that's the people who actually make new things. If you only want to distribute money to people with track records then a bureaucracy is the right address, because correctly licensing, testing, rewarding, and promoting people based on their track record is the very essence of the ideal Weberian bureaucracy. Keeping track of who does a good job is 90% of what bureaucracies are all about.