Quotes & Sayings About Taxation

More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them. — Winston Churchill

Many of the opposition [to the new Federal Constitution] wish to take from Congress the power of internal taxation. Calculation has convinced me that this would be very mischievous. — Thomas Jefferson

If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how it is with representation. — Rush Limbaugh

Ither immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light. — Henry Hazlitt

It is urged that the use of the masculine pronouns he, his, and him in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of the government and from penalties for the violation of laws. There is no she or her or hers in the tax laws, and this is equally true of all the criminal laws. — Susan B. Anthony

Private property and free trade stand on exactly the same footing, both being essential and indivisible parts of liberty, both depending upon rights, which no body of men, whether called governments or anything else, can justly take from the individual. — Auberon Herbert

One by one, members of the Commons, speaking in turn at a lectern in the center of the chamber, added their charges and complaints. The King's councillors, they said, had grown rich at the cost of impoverishing the nation; they had deceived the King and wasted his revenues, causing the repeated demands for fresh subsidies. The people were too poor and feeble to endure further taxation. Let Parliament discuss instead how the King might maintain the war out of his own resources. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Abolish all taxation save that upon land values. — Henry George

Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new compositions, any bungler can add to the old. — Edmund Burke

A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

It's been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity - than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation. — Stefan Molyneux

This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight. — Robertson Davies

The government is there day in and day out, if you want all kids to have education, if you want to run courts, if you want to have an army, if you want to have roads, you've got to have the taxation system that funds everything that you expect. — Bill Gates

Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor. — John Ruskin

Government, possessing the power to create and issue currency and credit as money and enjoying the right to withdraw both currency and credit from circulation by taxation and otherwise, need not and should not borrow capital at interest as a means of financing government work and public enterprises. — Abraham Lincoln

By operating independently of government aid, the churches ... avoid the resentment of those who do not want to be forced to contribute to churches to which they do not belong and of their own members who do not welcome being forced to contribute through government taxation. — John M Swomley

The best way for the Government to maintain its credit is to pay as it goes-not by resorting to loans, but by keeping out of debt-through an adequate income secured by a system of taxation, external or internal, or both. — William McKinley

Ron Paul is crazy, the guardians of respectable opinion assured us. What they really meant was that Ron Paul defied traditional political categories and advanced positions outside the Clinton-to-Romney continuum. People whose minds have been formed in ideological prison camps for 12 years have learned to confine themselves within an approved range of possibilities. Tax me 35 percent or tax me 40 percent, but don't raise the possibility that taxation itself may be a moral issue rather than just a matter of numbers. Either bomb or starve that poor country, but don't tell me there might be a third option. The Fed should loosen or the Fed should tighten, but don't tell me our money supply doesn't need to be supervised by a central planner. As always, confine yourself to the three square inches of intellectual terrain the New York Times has graciously allotted to you. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Thanks to aid, a distressing number of African leaders care little about what their citizens want or need - after all it's the reverse of the Boston tea-party - no representation without taxation. — Dambisa Moyo

I came into politics partly because I want to be able to reduce taxes so that individuals have more of their money to spend, so that businesses have more of their money to create jobs, but I believe that lower taxes are sustainable when you get the public finances in order, so I will only make promises I can keep on taxation. — George Osborne

No taxation without respiration. — Tom Feeney

I believe in taxation and health care that is outside the usual libertarian mandate, because I don't want people to have to suffer. It's as simple as that. — Neil Peart

This was the argument put forward during the War when the expenditure on the army and navy had to be met; and this was the argument put forward in Germany and Austria after the War when a part of the population had to be provided with cheap food, the losses on the operation of the railways and other public undertakings met, and reparations payments made. The assistance of inflation is invoked whenever a government is unwilling to increase taxation or unable to raise a loan; that is the truth of the matter. — Ludwig Von Mises

The true principle of taxation is the benefit principle - those who benefit from a government service should pay for it. It's also known as the 'user pay' principle. Every effort should be made to link the payment of taxes or fees to the cost associated with the government service. — Mark Skousen

There can be no such thing as 'fairness in taxation.' Taxation is nothing but organized theft, and the concept of a 'fair tax' is therefore every bit as absurd as that of 'fair theft.' — Murray Rothbard

In the laws of the land, she has no rights; in government she has no voice. And in spite of another principle recognized in this Republic, namely, that 'taxation without representation is tyranny,' she is taxed without being represented. — Ernestine Rose

Inflation is not a benign element in the economy's operation. It is, as it has always been, the most dangerous and destructive form of taxation. — Robert Higgs

Taxation has its limitations as a method of achieving better economic distribution since for this purpose it is essentially remedial. We must also take a positive approach by finding new ways to spread ownership of future capital growth more broadly in our society. — John D. Rockefeller

A libertarian presidential candidate isn't going to win anyway, so he can afford to say that all taxation is theft, and it isn't the job of a libertarian presidential candidate to cook up new ways to commit theft. — L. Neil Smith

I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them. — Mark Twain

all government expenditures must eventually be paid out of the proceeds of taxation; that inflation itself is merely a form, and a particularly vicious form, of taxation. Having — Henry Hazlitt

Highly graduate taxation realizes most completely the supreme danger of democracy, creating a state of things in which one class imposes on another burdens which it is not asked to share, and impels the State into vast schemes of extravagance, under the belief that the whole costs will be thrown upon others. — William Edward Hartpole Lecky

The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and '20s. — Thomas Piketty

Taxes are indeed very heavy -
We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness.
Three times as much by our Pride.
And four times as much by our Folly. — Benjamin Franklin

For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education. — Adam Smith

[Libertarians] don't denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don't quibble over their coercers' credentials. If you can't pay or don't want to, you don't much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration. — Bob Black

Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed. — Bernard Berenson

The American Dream was not about government's taking huge sums of money (under the label of "taxation") from citizens by force. The American Dream was about individualism and the opportunity to achieve success without interference from others. — Robert Ringer

Two things are essential for getting people to trust in the system: fair courts and equally fair taxation. Just these two." In — Yoshiki Tanaka

Socialism is about claims of justice, and it is also about money: about wealth, income, physical and financial capital. It is an ideology based on allocating economic resources. It may try to achieve that goal by nationalizing assets, by command-and-control regulation, or by taxation and redistribution. — Virginia Postrel

If we are true to Canada, if we do not desire to become part and parcel of these people, we cannot overlook this the greatest revolution of our times. Let us remember this, that when the three cries among our next neighbours are money, taxation, blood, it is time for us to provide for our own security ... — Thomas D'Arcy McGee

If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working. — Thomas Sowell

I don't have a chance [on being elected Mayor of New Orleans]. I'm running on the gay marriage, no religion, legalization and taxation of marijuana platform. — Brad Pitt

It is an absurd fiction that the churches are useful. They are nothing more than propaganda centers for superstitious faiths and doctrines. Church members have a right to believe in and propagate their various doctrines. But they should pay every item of the cost, of this propaganda, including fair taxation for all church property. — E. Haldeman-Julius

If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As clear as it is important, the death of Detroit is still mostly ignored. Generally, the slow destruction of a major city would get a fair amount of attention, but the lack of coverage is hardly surprising. After all, the "bad guys" aren't the popular ones. In most circles, condemning taxation, regulation, unionization, welfarism and protectionism is unfashionable. It's necessary to check political correctness at the door and appreciate that the case of Detroit isn't an isolated tragedy. What happened in Detroit could be coming to a city near you. — Dan Greenup

A general principle of good taxation is that similar jobs, and similar kinds of compensation, should be taxed the same way: otherwise, the government is effectively subsidizing some jobs over others. — James Surowiecki

Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. — Frederic Bastiat

Antinomy, that is, the existence of two laws or tendencies which are opposed to each other, is possible, not only with two different things, but with one and the same thing. Considered in their thesis, that is, in the law or tendency which created them, all the economical categories are rational, - competition, monopoly, the balance of trade, and property, as well as the division of labor, machinery, taxation, and credit. But, like communism and population, all these categories are antinomical; all are opposed, not only to each other, but to themselves. All is opposition, and disorder is born of this system of opposition. Hence, the sub-title of the work, - "Philosophy of Misery." No category can be suppressed; the opposition, antinomy, or contre-tendance, which exists in each of them, cannot be suppressed. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property ... Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. — Thomas Jefferson

I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen. — Thomas Piketty

The best system of education is that which draws its chief support from the voluntary effort of the community, from the individual efforts of citizens, and from those burdens of taxation which they voluntarily impose upon themselves. — James A. Garfield

Peace and prosperity are inversely proportional to the level of taxation. — John Pugsley

Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this. — Rose Macaulay

At the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments. — Ibn Khaldun

So why don't Americans cheat? Because they think that their system is legitimate. People accept authority when they see that it treats everyone equally, when it is possible to speak up and be heard, and when there are rules in place that assure you that tomorrow you won't be treated radically different from how you are treated today. Legitimacy is based on fairness, voice and predictability, and the U.S. government, as much as Americans like to grumble about it, does a pretty good job of meeting all three standards. Pg. 293 — Malcolm Gladwell

Contrary to any claim of a systematically "neutral" effect of taxation on production, the consequence of any such shortening of roundabout methods of production is a lower output produced. The price that invariably must be paid for taxation, and for every increase in taxation, is a coercively lowered productivity that in turn reduces the standard of living in terms of valuable assets provided for future consumption. Every act of taxation necessarily exerts a push away from more highly capitalized, more productive production processes in the direction of a hand-to-mouth-existence. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

In a very humbling process, the Swiss have had to admit to their faults and compromise on secrecy, changing the law and releasing the names of bank clients to please the US, as well as signing a dozen double taxation agreements in six months to please the OECD. — Clare O'Dea

We are looking for a Wealth Tax that will bring in sufficient revenue to justify having a wealth tax. — Dick Spring

Like all other self-respecting peoples, we have no intention of paying our debts. Or, to be more nearly accurate, the capitalists who expect to exploit us " for all time and eternity " have no intention of permitting us to pay our debts. They trump up new schemes to cause us to go more deeply into their debt. They intoxicate us with the strong fumes of "world power." They tell us how fine a thing it is to be reckoned among the great nations of the world. They cause us to maintain great military establishments and to build more and greater dreadnoughts. Thirty years ago we spent almost nothing on the navy and little more on the army. Now we are spending $300,000,000 a year on the army and navy. Almost a million dollars every week-day. Sixty-five cents of every dollar that is raised by the American government by taxation is spent for wars past or to come - for pensions, battleships or soldiers. — Anonymous

The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. — Rutherford B. Hayes

By taking out a loan, I am committing myself to years of interest repayments, and therefore to years of wage slavery. And the U.K. has been borrowing like crazy since 1694, when the Bank of England was invented. This means that we are locked into high taxation to pay for 300 years of wars and other costly and generally disastrous state enterprises. — Tom Hodgkinson

Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. — Ronald Reagan

A fool and his money are soon invited everywhere. — Warren Buffett

Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's inhabitants, or subjects. — Murray N. Rothbard

Here we shall have to say simply that all government expenditures must eventually be paid out of the proceeds of taxation; that inflation itself is merely a form, and a particularly vicious form, of taxation. — Henry Hazlitt

The cardinal rule of taxation is that whatever you put a levy on, you'll inevitably get less of. Taxing corporate activity means less investing, less hiring, fewer jobs and a smaller economy, which hurts the rich, the poor and the middle class alike. — Adam Davidson

The State has a legal monopoly on the right to use aggression against others in the form of taxation and compulsory edicts (legislation). Not only must "customers" pay into its operation without regard to their consent, but they must surrender to the rules its internal processes determine at all times. Additionally, the State has a monopoly on the provision of security, and has anointed itself as the ultimate arbiter in all conflicts, including those conflicts which involve its own agents. It — Christopher Chase Rachels

Everything a politician promises at election time has to be paid for either by higher taxation or by borrowing. — Margaret Thatcher

The liberals who demanded equality of taxation on behalf of the poor, for instance, did not imagine that they would obtain progressive taxation to the disadvantage of the well-off, and that they would end up with an arrangement in which taxes are voted by those who do not pay them. — Vilfredo Pareto

By the time of Athelstan the country was divided into shires, hundreds and vills or townships, precisely in order to expedite taxation. The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974. The earliest of them date from the late seventh and early eighth centuries, but many of their borders lie further back in the shape of the Iron Age tribal kingdoms. So the essential continuity of England was assured. Hampshire is older than France. Other shires, like those in the midlands, were constructed later; but they are still very ancient. — Peter Ackroyd

The libertarian sees the State as a giant gang of organized criminals, who live off the theft called "taxation" and use the proceeds to kill, enslave, and generally push people around. Therefore, any property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. Any person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty. — Murray Rothbard

In the woe of the century no factor caused more trouble than the persistent lag between the growth of the state and the means of state financing. While centralized government was developing, taxation was still encased in the concept that taxes represented an emergency measure requiring consent. — Barbara W. Tuchman

I don't know how you feel, but I'm pretty sick of church people. You know what they ought to do with churches? Tax them. If holy people are so interested in politics, government, and public policy, let them pay the price of admission like everybody else. The Catholic Church alone could wipe out the national debt if all you did was tax their real estate. — George Carlin

Our aim is to make tax collecting a declining industry. — Margaret Thatcher

Strengthening the role the United Nations can play ... will require serious examination of the need to extend into the international arena the rule of law and the principle of taxation to finance agreed actions which provide the basis for governance at the national level. But this will not come about easily. Resistance to such changes is deeply entrenched. They will come about not through the embrace of full blown world government, but as a careful and pragmatic response to compelling imperatives and the inadequacies of alternatives. — Maurice Strong

The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending. — Naomi Klein

No state, no government exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men. — Rose Wilder Lane

Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation. — Fletcher Knebel

We fought the Revolutionary War for no taxation without representation, it seems to me that we are much worse off today, because we are heavily taxed, and only the king's corporations control this Country, together with mob rule, of the special interests. — James Montgomery

No animal on the face of the earth could conceive of taxation. You and I work roughly six months a year to pay our local, state and federal taxes. If nothing else, this should convince you that animals are smarter than people. — Rita Mae Brown

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. — Ray Bradbury

Set men up to rule their fellow-men, to treat them as mere soulless material with which they may deal as they please, and the consequence is that you sweep away every moral landmark and turn this world into a place of selfish striving, hopeless confusion, trickery and violence, a mere scrambling ground for the strongest or the most cunning or the most numerous. — Auberon Herbert

All the forms of double taxation in the current system are punitive and self-destructive because they are literally destroying people's incentive to provide that seed corn for future economic growth. — Daniel J. Mitchell

I would vote against raising the national debt ceiling. Again, this is about mortgaging the future of unborn generations of Americans. It's a form of taxation without representation. I don't think we can do that. — Mike Lee

So the economic benefit of higher education in arts subjects appears to be nil. In fact, it is a luxury in the sense that it costs money rather than yielding it. It is a luxury which is paid for out of general taxation, including taxation of the poor. — James Bartholomew

The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities or to find other lawful methods of avoiding the realization of taxable income. The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up; wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people. — Andrew Mellon

It should be pointed out, however, that throughout the debate emphasis was placed on raising money only for the proper expense of government.3 None of the advocates of income taxation spoke of expanding the functions of government, and while the opposition mentioned "socialism" it seems doubtful that they had any idea of a New Deal. The American mind of the nineteenth century was incapable of comprehending paternalism, regulation, and control; it was too strongly rooted in the past for that. Even those who advocated the tax method of undermining private property were not aware of what they were doing, and would probably have stopped in their tracks if they could have foreseen the consequences of their proposal. It was not any urgency for Big Government - which they could not even have understood - that prompted them to advocate income taxation. It was simply an urgency to "soak the rich" - the very common sin of envy. — Frank Chodorov

Taxation is the price which civilized communities pay for the opportunity of remaining civilized. — Albert Bushnell Hart

What I argue for is a progressive tax, a global tax, based on the taxation of private property. — Thomas Piketty

The old liberal rebelled against taxation without responsibility, the new liberal wants the taxation as a handout without responsibility. — Fulton J. Sheen

The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water - all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip. * — Sinclair Lewis

Throughout his life, Ronald Reagan believed America is capable of great things and its people could and would lead the way if left unburdened by taxation and regulation. — William L. Jenkins

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. — Ayn Rand

An education system where student selection is based on credit capacity and not merit capacity and where graduating students are no longer indebted to the nation, but increasingly indebted to the Australian Taxation Office - that's no way to improve the quality of education. — Gough Whitlam

Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue from coercion, from taxation. — Murray Rothbard

The crime of taxation is not in the taking it, it's in the way that it's spent. — Will Rogers

Government should concentrate on building up infrastructure and skill development. Simplification of taxation is another important area. — Jamshyd Godrej

The founders understood that democracy would inevitably evolve into a system of legalized plunder unless the plundered were given numerous escape routes and constitutional protections such as the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, election of senators by state legislators, the electoral college, no income taxation, most governmental functions performed at the state and local levels, and myriad other constitutional limitations on the powers of the central government. — Thomas DiLorenzo

Justice requires that you should not place the burdens of one man on the shoulders of another man, even though he is better able to bear them. In plainer words, that you should not make one set of men pay for what is used by another set of men. — Auberon Herbert