If so, Frank, you can in part thank estate taxes. Mindless rightwing rhetoric that government is simply inherently evil to the contrary, for over a century progressive governments have used the estate tax for the narrow and worthy purpose of breaking up dynastic fortunes and preventing the (re)creation of an aristocracy. A case like the Lee's is a very good reminder of the good the estate tax does.

It's disingenuous to cite only the American estate tax rate, without also noting that Republicans have progressively raised the threshold to the point that it applies to, statistically, nobody--something like 0.01% of Americans are even theoretically required to pay it, but that's before they apply the routine tax evasion tactics, some of which were discussed in that article, that are the reason that the US government collects only $12 billion in a population of 330 million. Like I said, statistically insignificant.

No doubt you 've heard about Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century". I'm about halfway through, and I'm finding it a remarkable work because it's the first time I've ever seen the scientific method applied to economics. (Many people mistake economics for a branch of mathematics because economists toss around a lot of numbers, but nothing could be farther from the truth--it's all about making assumptions and guesses about human behavior; a branch of sociology, in other words.) There are graphs scattered throughout the book, but what's interesting is that most of them have a consistent U shape, showing financial inequality very high at the beginning of the 20th century, bottoming-out at the end of WWII, and starting to rise again in 1970 and eventually reaching a level today equivalent to the turn of the 20th century.

Flip the graph vertically, and you have a graph of the number of people in the middle class. The middle class was created both by circumstances such as war and financial crash, and the deliberate policies of progressive governments that instituted things like progressive income tax rates and the estate tax to minimize inequality and spread the wealth.

A rising tide doesn't lift all boats because of capitalism. It lifts all boats because of government policies that rein in capitalism.

Including the estate tax.