And your definition of "fair playing field" is skewed because, again, you treat economics as a zero sum game. You are making the classic mistake of conflating equality of outcome with equality of opportunity.
In any case, this class warfare inspired policy of exhaustively taxing wealth won't fix a mismanaged budget or a broken scholarly culture. You are simply punishing the people who seem to have benefited most in the context of the system while ignoring merit.
Further, it is absolutely absurd to suggest that modern people in poverty dont live "good" lives. They have refrigeration, air conditioning, entertainment, access to the internet, emergency healthcare, they live like kings once did. Once again this is a problem of looking at other peoples' lives and concluding that only in comparison you deserve more for simply existing.
Taxation will not fix what is fundamentally a cultural problem.
Aside: Look at how absurd the entire argument is! We dont question in absolute terms how our poor are living, we focus entirely on the fact that the wealth is distributed unevenly. Like children complaining that their classmates have extra candy. The whole mindset is petty.
Don't you think that inheritance is a pretty bad way of achieving that? After all, traits like intelligence (which probably dominates the ability to use resources efficiently) are only about 50% heritable.
Why dont we spend more federal funds on gifted children? We watch the trainwreck that is our school system as we fail to match pupils in other countries at senior high school level. The issue is, again, not taxation, on the contrary, we are not spending enough where it counts because of the greed of the entitled.
Outcome and opportunity is a false dichotomy. But if we were to go along with it, isn't a tax on inherited wealth a great way to maintain equality of opportunity?
About merit, I think I know about merit. If you take the public transport at 5:30 in the morning you will see a lot of people that go to work for years for a ridiculous small pay and, that if they stopped doing that, society as we know would stop. That, I think, have a lot of merit.
On the other hand, in any standard corporation, you can find people with huge wages, with company car, that never pay a lunch because they put in the expenses account and that employ its time in political movements to try to go up in the ladder.
Of course, if you think that markets give everyone whatever they deserve, or you have not been in the public transport at 5:30, then, what I'm saying doesn't make any sense.
Leaving the metric to optimize to the optimization process doesn't look a good idea, the same way it's not a good idea to leave the thermostat to choose the temperature.
In my experience, the only people that think that the thermostat it's who should choose the temperature, it's the people that feels very comfortable with the current one and don't care about the comfort of the others in the house. Or, maybe, also the people that grew up in a house without thermostat and thinks, correctly, that anything is better.
Who are you to make that decision for someone?
And, frankly, you're delusional if you think an estate tax is non distortive. The entire meaning of wealth would change for the elderly.
One cannot treat wealth like a zero sum game. More importantly, we need to rid ourselves of this growing crabs in a bucket mentality, because we all suffer when we hold society's best back. Is it "fair" in the sense of absolute wealth? No, but people shouldn't be so focused on their neighbor's plate then theirs is full enough that they can spend hours complaining online about how much more money the 1% have. Perhaps we should redefine fair wealth distribution to rightfully consider merit, which is shockingly absent from the majority view here.