Interesting point, I think I could get behind this way of thinking. Normally, I'd prefer to be taxed mostly on consumption (sales tax, VAT, etc), so my views were that inheritance tax should be lowered - the heirs will be taxed when they spend what they got anyway (or they can sit on the unused pile of cash, fine)1. Unfortunately, society seems to equate rich with smart, hard working, or deserving in some other way, and that is not really the case with people that got their money from their parents.

1) This assumes there are no tricks around inheriting assets that have unrealized gains, I don't know how this works in the US.

EDIT: fixed (?) asterisk. EDIT2: replaced asterisk with 1, cannot figure out how to escape it.