Dear Mr Buffet,

You have been reported, both in this newspaper and in others, as suggesting that the repealing of inheritance taxes in the U.S would be the equivalent of "choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the sons of the gold medal winners of the 2000 Olympics." By making such an analogy, you are necessarily assuming that life is a race for a specific goal, namely, to make as much money as possible. Yet this assumption is clearly fallacious. Life is not a race, nor does life have any specific goal. Every person has different aims and ambitions. We all need money to live, but money is not what life is about. If the only purpose of life were to make money, then there would not be any scientists, or doctors, or teachers, or farmers, or musicians, or artists, or soldiers, etc. etc. But fortunately there are. Now if a doctor happens to inherit some money, would this inheritance make him a better doctor? If a musician inherits some money, would that make him play better? The fact is that inheritance does not make anyone more capable - it simply allows people to live slightly more comfortable, and slightly more civilised lives.

You have also been quoted as saying that by eliminating inheritance, people will be allowed to succeed "on merit." By "merit" I presume you mean commercial ability i.e. the ability to make money. Now we all know countless intelligent people who are totally incapable of making money. Does that mean that they have no "merit"? And yet commercial ability is just a skill like any other skill - like being able to run fast or having a good singing voice or having a scientific mind. Why should commercial ability be the only quality that constitutes "merit"? Let us suppose that there are two brothers, one of whom is a very fine man in every way, but who is not a good businessman, while the other brother is vicious and evil but a very good businessman. Which of them has the "merit"? Must the "good" brother be consigned to poverty all his life, because he has no commercial ability? Furthermore, you are much too intelligent not to be aware that a large part of business success is luck. Does "business luck" constitute a part of "merit", and if so, why is "business luck" more acceptable than "inheritance luck"? Finally there is the fact that we live in a wicked world and there are quite a few people in it who are not as honest and upright as you and I are. Did Michael Milken become a billionaire by "merit"? Don't we all know about billionaires or semi-billionaires who have been very successful in your "Olympics race", but who should be behind bars? Is their success due to "merit"?

Lastly, I would like to put to you a question of logic. When I was a young man, I became interested in I.Q.s, and I decided to take an I.Q. test. When I told my father about my experience, he became interested and he took the same test. His I.Q. and mine were exactly the same. Furthermore, all my life people used to tell me how much I looked like my mother. So my question is: If I am allowed to inherit my father's brains and my mother's looks, what logical reason is there that I should not also inherit their money? Your own brains were also inherited - you did not find them on the street. Should we, therefore, have an inheritance tax on brains? In fact, all of every person's qualities are inherited at birth. Should we perhaps also put a tax on looks, or on athletic ability, or on "merit"?

It is difficult to imagine anything more outrageous or more hypocritical than a group of men, whose own wealth is obscene, trying to dictate how much money other people should be allowed to have. Is that how you want people to remember you?

D P Marchessini