Government Theft Quotes

#1. I must confess the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occurred to him.

Terry Pratchett

#2. I think, with Obama and the progressives, you've seen a massive expansion of big government, and it's all based on a moral premise. The moral premise is that wealth is theft. And I don't just mean the wealth of America, I mean, your wealth, my wealth.

Dinesh D'Souza

#3. You cannot have an agency that defends your property, which also has the right to violate your property rights at will. That's like hiring a bodyguard that you pay to beat you up randomly.

Stefan Molyneux

#4. I am always looking for ways our government can help make everyday life easier for Ontarians, and these new polymer birth certificates do just that. Having a safe and durable birth certificate will provide more security and help protect people from fraud and identify theft.

Kathleen Wynne

#5. Vassals of an outdated ideology unrelated to the real world, they can, when questioned on this issue, only mumble neoliberal mantras that have delivered the world economic stagnation, rising inequality and global environmental crisis

Richard Flanagan

#6. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frederic Bastiat

#7. The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
...
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.

Lao-Tzu

#8. 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

#9. We've got this weird dysgenic situation where we're basically just paying idiots to breed and taxing intelligent people to stay away from each other with anything remotely resembling fertility.

Stefan Molyneux

#10. I wish to note that intellectual property theft by a government represents the very essence of organized crime.

Howard Berman

#11. What is government but theft by consent?

Scott Lynch

#12. It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it, and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.

Albert Jay Nock

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.

Jeffrey Tucker

#16. The Chinese government does not engage in theft of commercial secrets in any form, nor does it encourage or support Chinese companies to engage in such practices in any way.

Xi Jinping

#17. No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a state-managed society.

Jeffrey Tucker

#18. I believe the term is 'eminent domain.'
Ah, yes. That means 'theft by the government,

Terry Pratchett

#19. The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

George Santayana

#20. If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.

Lysander Spooner

#21. Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to steal for you.

Ron Paul

#22. I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum.

William Weld

#23. Using coercion to drive charity is like using kidnapping to create love.

Stefan Molyneux

#24. Don't steal - the government hates competition!

Ron Paul

#25. 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

#26. The government is a tyrant living by theft, and therefore has no business to engage in any business.

Benjamin Tucker

#27. Surely the President can agree with us, that theft from government is not good. I know it's bold. It's out on the edge. I know from a Chicago-Springfield background it's hard to fully grasp that honesty could be part of government.

Newt Gingrich

#28. Government income redistribution programs produce the same result as theft. In fact, that's what a thief does; he redistributes income. The difference between government and thievery is mostly a matter of legality.

Walter E. Williams

#29. When government does more than guard against the initiation of force, inevitably it becomes a means of theft and bamboozlement.

Donald J. Boudreaux

#30. 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

#31. By this means the government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.

John Maynard Keynes

#32. There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

Isabel Paterson