Top 73 Quotes About Government Taxation
#1. 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
#2. In many ways, the system of government, taxation and military organization developed by the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the envy of Western Europe.
Noel Malcolm
#3. If the Negro knows enough to pay taxes to support the government, he knows enough to vote; taxation and representation should go together. If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag, fight for the government, he knows enough to vote.
Frederick Douglass
#4. Is there a point of taxation wherein even a Democrat would acknowledge it is thievery by the government?
Dennis Prager
#5. Let me tell you, that's what taxation is - it's confiscation. It's your money, it's not the government's money. But the government makes you think that it all comes from them.
Rafael Cruz
#6. As to Taxes, they are evidently inseparable from Government. It is impossible without them to pay the debts of the nation, to protect it from foreign danger, or to secure individuals from lawless violence and rapine.
Alexander Hamilton
#8. If you believe women are constituted differently to men then remove taxation from them. But if you're a democrat and you believe in government of the people by the people and for the people, then you believe in fair play. So when you tax women, give them the vote as well.
James Munro
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Taxes should be continued by annual or biennial reeactments, because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse is a salutary restraint from which an honest government ought not wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free.
Thomas Jefferson
#13. So vast a sum, receiving all the protection and benefits of the government, without bearing its proportion of the burdens and expenses of the same, will not be looked upon acquiescently by those who have to pay the taxes ... I would suggest the taxation of all property equally.
Ulysses S. Grant
#14. My first rule - the golden rule - ensures that over the economic cycle the Government will borrow only to invest, and that current spending will be met from taxation.
Gordon Brown
#15. Some doomsayers think the collapse will be triggered by runaway government spending, excessive taxation, oppressive regulation, food shortages, fuel shortages or natural disasters such as deadly pandemics or lethal changes in the world's climate.
Robert Higgs
#16. No government can exist without taxation. The money must necessarily be levied on the people; and the grand art consists of levying so as not to oppress.
Frederick The Great
#17. Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies.
Immanuel Wallerstein
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Taxation is, in fact, the most difficult function of government and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory.
Thomas Jefferson
#22. Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed.
John Maynard Keynes
#23. In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.
Albert Jay Nock
#24. 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
#25. If the exercise of power of internal taxation by the Union should be discovered on experiment to be really inconvenient, the federal government may then forbear the use of it ...
Alexander Hamilton
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.
Henry Hazlitt
#29. Government should concentrate on building up infrastructure and skill development. Simplification of taxation is another important area.
Jamshyd Godrej
#30. The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
...
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.
Lao-Tzu
#31. 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
#32. When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government.
Grover Cleveland
#33. I prefer for government to err toward less regulation, lower taxation, and free markets. And I'm a radical free trader.
Mark McKinnon
#34. Besides, we had a large debt, contracted at home and abroad in our War of Independence; therefore the great power of taxation was conferred upon this Government.
Robert Toombs
#35. America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation.
Laurence J. Peter
#37. Socialism is not a meritocracy. By definition it places increasingly confining restraints on those that succeed the most.
A.E. Samaan
#38. Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.
Robert Higgs
#39. Liberal redistributionists in favor of heavy taxation place less weight on incentive than do small-government conservatives.
Edmund Phelps
#40. The surest way for a poor nation to stay poor is to harass, hobble, and straitjacket private enterprise or to discourage or destroy it by subsidized government competition, oppressive taxation, or outright expropriation.
Henry Hazlitt
#41. Taxation is not charity. It is not voluntary. As we shrink the state and make government smaller, we will find that more and more people are able to take care of themselves.
Grover Norquist
#42. It is not the role of government to use the taxation and welfare system as a tool to level the playing field.
Joe Hockey
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased - not a reduced - flow of revenues to the federal government.
John F. Kennedy
#46. Government spending is taxation. When you look at this, I've never heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity; let alone I've never heard of a poor person taxing himself into prosperity.
Arthur Laffer
#47. Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
Bernard Berenson
#48. The power of creating new funds upon new objects of taxation, by its own authority, would enable the national government to borrow as far as its necessities might require.
Alexander Hamilton
#49. Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.
Peter Schiff
#50. 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
#51. The Government is able to afford a suitable army and a suitable navy. It may maintain them without the slightest danger to the Republic or the cause of free institutions, and fear of additional taxation ought not to change a proper policy in this regard.
William Howard Taft
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. New taxes are so unpopular that most 'social' handout schemes are originally enacted without enough increased taxation to pay for them. The result is chronic government deficits, paid for by the issuance of additional paper money.
Henry Hazlitt
#56. Of all the powers conferred upon government, that of taxation is most liable to abuse.
Samuel Freeman Miller
#57. Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue from coercion, from taxation.
Murray Rothbard
#58. 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
#59. Beware the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.
Thomas Paine
#60. A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species.
James Madison
#61. 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
#62. The point of taxation isn't that the government knows better than you how to spend your money - it's that the government, by virtue of being the government, can spend money in ways that no private citizen or group no matter how powerful, can.
Jesse Taylor
#63. 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
#64. Volcker relied on public opinion, integrity, and persistence to overcome the political pressure to finance government spending the easy way, by printing money rather than by taxation.
William L. Silber
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum.
William Weld
#71. In a general sense, all contributions imposed by the government upon individuals for the service of the state, are called taxes, by whatever name they may be known, whether by the name of tribute, tythe, tallage, impost, duty, gabel, custom, subsidy, aid, supply, excise, or other name.
Joseph Story
#72. Government can wreck a business by confiscating its money by taxation.
Owen Paterson
#73. It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.
Alexis De Tocqueville
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