My father’s penchant for the miraculous naturally drew him to Israel, the illogically and astonishingly reborn homeland of his forefathers. He made his first of many trips in 1949, shortly after the world recognized the independence of the flourishing Jewish state, and settled there in 1990 after his retirement. That retirement lasted less than a month, before he felt compelled to start a new company (JOLT – Jerusalem Optical Link Technology) and to build a new life in his late sixties and early seventies.

That life proved too fulfilling and demanding to interrupt for illness: he kept his diagnosis with lymphoma a complete secret from even his closest family members, and lived with the disease for nine years before any of us found out. His survival for fourteen years of vibrant and (until the very end) unimpeded living, with the help of chemotherapy, prayer and unassailable optimism, constituted my father’s concluding miracle. Less than fifteen minutes before his death, he talked with his nurses about his plans to celebrate the festive Purim holiday.

The Death Tax is Not Only Ill-Advised, but Evil. For several reasons, we don’t have to deal with the nasty insanity of the inheritance tax as we go through the mourning process for my father. Alas, he failed to accumulate the kind of wealth that would provoke the posthumous attention of the American tax man: even the most radical “reform” proposals of Barack Obama would exempt all estates below one-million dollars, so confiscatory new policies (including a prospective return of a crushing 55% rate!) would leave the Medved family alone. Moreover, my dad made his home in Israel for the last two decades of his life and the Jewish state, though imposing a heavy tax burden in other areas to pay for the nation’s hugely expensive defense forces, avoids inheritance taxes altogether. Israeli leaders rightly understand that death taxes are immoral: they punish families at their most vulnerable moments and tax money that has already been taxed when it was originally earned.

Going through my dad’s things in his suddenly empty apartment, we agreed on assigning various possessions to each of the four brothers—with, for instance, some books and CD’s going to Ben, some candlesticks going to Harry, a dining room table for Jon, a recently purchased laptop for one of our cousins, and so forth. In the midst of this sad but necessary chore, I felt enraged and indignant at the idea that in other families, in other situations, the federal government would claim its own share of everything – and would, in fact, demand more of the material possessions of the deceased than any relative. By what right? How dare they! If an individual chooses to give his resources to the government, of course that’s his prerogative, but how can Uncle Sam insist on crowding out intimate survivors when it comes to dividing a lifetime of wealth?

Aside from interfering with the sacred and healthy desire of parents to leave a legacy for children, death taxes also discriminate in a disgusting way against big families --- because the government grabs its share based on the total amount left behind, not on the extent of the gift to the various heirs. In other words, under typical proposed rules (which may come into play as soon as 2011) a couple with one son would be able to leave him up to a million dollars tax free, with every dollar above that amount taxed at a punishing rate. But a family with five children that wants to divide its estate equally would be able to give each of those kids only $200,000 tax free, before that same obscene rate kicks into force. The effective tax rate for a member of a large family is therefore much higher than for an only child or the member of a small family. The obnoxious penalty against large families also shows that the most common justification for inheritance taxes is, actually, a fraud. If the liberal planners truly meant to prevent “concentrations of wealth” then surely they would cut some slack to estates that were divided among large numbers of family members. A departed head of household who designates many beneficiaries has already elected to “spread the wealth around” and hardly needs the Obama administration to execute the process for him.

At a time of loss and grief and celebratory remembrance of a dearly loved parent, it’s an outrage that mourners – any mourners – should need to fend off the clutches of a predatory government. Why would federal officials want to punish or burden the survivors of a citizen who’s worked, saved, paid taxes and created wealth over the course of a lifetime? Even though the proposals for a renewed, even more diabolical death tax remain blessedly irrelevant to my own father, I hope to honor his memory by fighting with renewed energy (and, yes, joyous energy) to turn back all suggestions of afflicting the bereaved with onerous and unjustifiable assessments.

My father spent his long and happy life passionately animated by a sense of fairness and common sense, so in his honor I hope to stand up against the insanity of governmental theft aimed at the deceased. Dave Medved always appreciated the anti-tax fervor of the founding fathers (taking me as a small boy to Independence Hall and Valley Forge) and would support the appropriate modification of their revolutionary slogan in the ongoing struggle against the death tax: “NO TAXATION --- WITHOUT RESPIRATION!”