Don't Say We Weren't Warned

By Harris Sherline
December 17, 2009

No matter how it's phrased, from the time of the Roman Empire, the maxim has consistently been the same: a society cannot tax its way to wealth. Dating back many centuries, it has been repeatedly stated, yet each succeeding generation of politicians has refused to listen.

"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing" --Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), French Economist and Minister of Finance under King Louis XIV of France.

"The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor" -William Cobbett (1763-1835), Pseudonym Peter Porcupine, English popular journalist, champion of traditional rural England against the Industrial Revolution

" "When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before." -Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), American humorist, journalist and critic of American life.

"Sound principles will not justify our taxing the industry of our fellow citizens to accumulate treasure for wars to happen we know not when, and which might not perhaps happen but from the temptations offered by that treasure." - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd U.S. president

"The wisdom of man never yet contrived a system of taxation that would operate with perfect equality." -Andrew Jackson (1767-1847), 7th U.S. president

"Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt." -William Cobbett (1763-1835), English popular journalist, champion of traditional rural England against the Industrial Revolution

"The crime of taxation is not in the taking it, it's in the way that it's spent." -Will Rogers (1879-1935), American humorist

"Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery. - Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), 30th U.S. president

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical." - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd U.S. president

"The power to tax involves the power to destroy." - John C. Marshall (1755-1835), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, in the case "McCulloch v. Maryland"

"For every benefit you receive a tax is levied." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American essayist, poet

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation." - Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), Russian Founder of the Russian Communist Party, leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917

"The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward." - John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), British economist

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster." - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American author, poet

"I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright

"Unnecessary taxation is unjust taxation." - Abram Stevens Hewitt, Democratic Platform of 1884

"The current tax code is a daily mugging." - Ronald Reagan, 40th U.S. president (1911-2004)

"Inflation is taxation without legislation. - Milton Friedman (1912-2006), American economist

"Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today." - Herman Wouk (1915-), American Author (The Caine Mutiny)

"America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation." -Dr. Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990), American "hierarchiologist", Educator and Writer

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." - Dr. Adrian Rogers (1931-), American pastor, three-term president of Southern Baptist Convention.

"If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation" -Bob Phillips (1951-), American television journalist

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