Jennifer Bird-Pollan (Kentucky) presented Nozick, Libertarianism, and the Estate Tax at Harvard yesterday as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium, organized by Daniel Halperin and Stephen E. Shay:

Contemporary policy discussions of taxes in general, and of the estate
tax in particular, are often dominated by arguments that start from
libertarian premises.  However, these libertarian views are rarely fully
unpacked, and, as a result, the conclusions
of these arguments often extend beyond what can be justified by those
libertarian premises.  With regard to the estate tax, many libertarians
argue that government interference with the free transfer of assets
after death is an immoral violation of the property
rights of the deceased.  In this Article, I work through the
libertarian arguments of Robert Nozick in his seminal work,
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, with special attention to his views
of property and inheritance rights.  By demonstrating that
libertarianism cannot justify property rights that extend beyond death, I
show that, in fact, libertarianism is entirely consistent
with a robust estate tax.  While this does not mean that the
libertarian views of property rights
require an estate tax, those views do not, on moral grounds, preclude the imposition of the tax.