One of the weekend papers reported that the government is contemplating a rise in inheritance tax, to 50% of all assets over £808,000. This, we're told, would 'raise £147m a year' and allow inheritance tax on smaller estates to be cut, meaning 9 in 10 people will pay less.

Rubbish. Rising house prices - and rising wealth generally - mean that more and more people will be caught in the top band.

And the tax won't raise anything. Indeed, death taxes have probably produced a negative return for all of their 100-year history (calculates Dr Barry Bracewell-Milnes in his ASI reports, Will to Succeed and Free Wills). Why? Because they induce people to consume their capital, spending it on things like foreign holidays, rather than maintaining it in productive assets that the government will grab 40% of. Or they devise elaborate tax shelters in which their capital is safer, but less productive. Or they just go abroad. Either way, it's the UK economy that loses out.

'The rich can afford it,' we're told. Maybe. But most folk with £808,000+ have earned it themselves, through hard work, having paid 40% income tax, plus national insurance, plus company taxes, and taxes on each employee. If they give money away, it's taxed. If they spend their riches on a larger home or car, they pay higher taxes on those too.

They might well conclude they've paid enough, and leave the country - just as many famous names (and others too) did in the 1970s, when tax rates were sky high. It took a long period of rate-cutting by Mrs Thatcher to get them, their brains, and their capital back to Britain.

Death taxes come at the worst time for families - bereavement. They cut across the fundamental human instinct to protect and provide for our offspring, family and friends. They are envy taxes which raise nothing. Indeed, they destroy capital. They should be scrapped.