The estate tax is in the news of late. I have yet to read anything to dislodge me from my view that post-death gifts should be treated the same as all other gifts, and therefore that we should eliminate the post-death basis step-up and apply a flat gift tax of whatever amount. I suppose that post-death gifts executed via will are marginally more costly than pre-death gifts executed via simple deed or change of title, but at most that justifies charging some extra legal fees to an estate with expensive litigation.

I also hold common cause with this old post by Tom Smith:

Support of the death tax is just creeping egalitarianism. It's just the clinging remainders of the view that if you didn't earn something yourself, somehow, the government should take it and give it someone who deserves it even less. This is a very silly view. What justifies a transfer of wealth is that someone wants me to have it, and so do I. A gift given and accepted is every bit as much a free transaction as a contract.

I was raised to believe that one doesn't put salt and pepper on the dinner table when guests are present because the chef is supposed to season things as they are meant to be seasoned. This always had an elegant appeal to me, but there is a problem. Different people prefer vastly different quantities of certain seasonings. I add ground chipotle to black beans until they are almost painful to eat. I make salad with a frightening amount of salt and three times more vinegar than oil. Others differ. And so on.

And of course this problem is made worse by restaurants, who obviously have no idea where the customer's palate falls. Lots of restaurants ask you how spicy you'd like a dish, but few ask how salty. Thus I admire Frank Bruni's (more precisely, Frank Bruni's dining companion's) solution of simply carrying some good coarse salt in an elegant container.

That said, some inner part of me blanches at the notion of bringing one's own food to the restaurant in order to improve it. The whole thing smacks a bit of medieval kings wary of poisoning one another or kids assembling their own meals out of sacks in the lunchroom. If somebody can figure out a better way to do this, or reassure my etiquette alarms, I welcome suggestions.