Why not? If I, as a parent, worked hard enough to make life easy for my child, who are you to tell me that I can't do it?(I mean in general, don't take this personally) I have paid tax on everything that I made, bought, or built - why would they pay tax on the same things again??
Following your argument, we should stop giving our children absolutely anything - you could argue that someone's child should not be given a phone or a car,because it's unfair towards someone else who had to work for it,right? But then why do you care - I worked hard to buy those things to give to my children. Anything else is irrelevant.
I can give you another example which makes me hate inheritance tax with passion - I know a family, which had a house which was owned by them for centuries. And then, when the parents died,they didn't have a lot of money, so the only thing left was that house. HMRC enters the scene -> children have to pay inheritance tax on the house. There is no money left,so they have to sell their family house, purely because people think it would be "unfair" for them to keep it. Absolute BS if you ask me.
The point is to increase your children's (that is, everyone's) reliance on the government, of course. The ideal for statists would be to remove parents from the equation completely. You've read Brave New World, right?
The point is that people should stand on their own two feet, and not coast through life on daddy's money (or government largesse, for that matter).
It won't, and it doesn't. You're misinformed on this topic.
There's a blanket exemption for estates up to $5,000,000: http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ...
Nobody is interested in taxing your kid's college fund--we just don't want the Waltons running our country for the next 100 years: http://walmart1percent.org/family/
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jun/03/uk-average-hous...
The tax is apparently 40%. So the heirs of a single person with a home worth twice the average will owe £11,600 in taxes (it looks like some of the exemption is transferable for couples, so ~0 taxes for lots of people).
It doesn't seem so onerous for people receiving a $600,000 house to have to pay $20,000 in taxes (it's certainly an amount that most owners of such houses will be able to plan for).
It's not a case for totally eliminating estate taxes.
This is totally valid, up to a certain point. Let's take the other extrem, when a child could inherit enough to get a better life without working than someone working his whole life. There is absolutely no need of such a concentration of wealth.
That's why inheritance should have a strongly progressive taxation rate.