> The proposal here is about people with 8+ figures in personal wealth. That's not the typical small family business.

Depending on how it’s set up, “personal wealth” includes the business’s assets. I don’t know what your conception of a “small family business” is exactly, but there are definitely cases where a long-running business has a lot more “wealth” than it generates.

I don’t have an easy way to verify this handy, but I’m familiar enough with farming to assert with reasonable certainty that many family farms have several million dollars in assets while generating <$200k in yearly income. For a multi-generational farm, land value becomes a bigger and bigger issue.

For instance, my grandparents owned what most would probably consider a “hobby farm” in central Arkansas. I believe their parents purchased the land originally in the mid-1800s, when it was a rural area. It’s now very much in the middle of a small city and the land is worth many multiples of what it’s being used for today. My grandmother on that side passed a couple of years ago and to be honest I’m not sure who actually owns the land now - I know it’s still in the family because one of my aunts still lives in the original home on the property.

I don’t have a direct interest in this (I see no way I’d ever end up “inheriting the farm”), but I would very much be opposed to the state essentially confiscating the land that my family has owned for five generations. The land alone has likely increased in value in the past two centuries that its fair market value is more than $10m - but as far as I know my family has no interest in selling it, and as far as I know no one in my family has the means to pay taxes on that much value.

One reason for taxing property is to force productive use of the fenced-in commons. If your land isn't being used in a way that enables payment of the full tax burden, then it should probably be sold off to people who are willing to help society extract the full value of that land. And taxes on inherited land should be attenuated, in part, to ensure productive use of land.

Where you see an unfair confiscation of your family's birthright, I see an unproductive use of the commons. The whole moral justification of fencing off the commons is to enable more productive use; if that productive use isn't going to happen, then we should either take down the fence or let someone else manage the land.

Or, suppose that's not the justification for private property and everything is birthright. The just and right birthright to land settled in central Arkansas in the 1800s probably belongs to the Osage.