A s Sheldon Pollack writes in this issue ["It's Alive," page 29], Republicans in Congress are close to killing the estate tax. Some remnant will survive, but it could be significantly cut, and with the collusion of many Democrats. Why get rid of a tax paid only by the richest 1 percent of Americans? Why scrap our only wealth tax, one that accounted for $28 billion dollars of revenue in 1999? You can understand why Republicans favor repeal, but why do numerous Democrats follow suit? The answer, in brief, is campaign finance. Only half of 1 percent of voters contribute more than $250 to political candidates. But these are the people that candidates hang out with--and of course these are the people with estates large enough to pay tax. Only in this crowd is $28 billion of federal revenue chump change. As Pollack points out, the lost revenue gradually rises to over $50 billion a year. That kind of money could buy prescription drug coverage for the...

Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. —Milton Friedman , Capitalism and Freedom I n a market economy, as Charles E. Lindblom reminded us in Politics and Markets , business holds a position of special privilege. It tends to dominate not just the economy, but the polity and the prevailing ideology. Though business lost some of its luster in the excesses of the 1980s, the pendulum did not swing back toward a national mood of greater public-mindedness as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had predicted. On the contrary, the prestige of business has come roaring back in the '90s, as the American economy has regained competitive strength globally. The dynamism of business is taken as simple proof of its virtue. Indeed, the last time business enjoyed such general approbation was nearly a lifetime ago—before the great crash...