Murray Rothbard Quotes

By its nature, governments and taxes are not voluntary. Government actions are violent and coercive, and theft as well.

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

When the country's indebtedness is so colossal and where the budget deficit is so huge, there is a moral obligation on people to pay their fair and reasonable dues.

Remember that government doesn't earn one single dollar it spends. In order for you to get money from the government, that money must first be taken from somebody else.

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.

The art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.

The power to tax is the power to govern.

Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it.

No government can exist without taxation.... This money must of necessity be levied on the people; and the grand art consists in levying so as not to oppress.

I just don't want to pay taxes.

Aside from sending someone to war or to prison, government s ability to make people involuntarily give over their money is its strongest exercise of authority over private citizens and their institutions.

Taxation is, in fact, the most difficult function of government and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory.

Taxes are the sinews of the state.

"I pay my taxes," says somebody, as if that were an act of virtue instead of one of compulsion.

Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.

It is a general idea, that when taxes are once laid on, they are never taken off.

The rope by which the great blocks of taxes are attached to any citizenry is simple loyalty.

Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. It existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. 'Government money,' of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing.

Labor has come out with a series of proposals to increase taxes, including taxes on people across Australia saving for their retirement, he has actually identified so far zero dollars in spending reductions.

Alexander Hamilton originated the put and take system in our national treasury: the taxpayers put it in, and the politicians take it out

While some people might find it distasteful to pay taxes, I don't. I find it patriotic.

When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money?

The institution of taxation is not a civilized but a barbaric method to fund anything, because it amounts to nothing less than outright extortion, a gross violation of human liberty.

The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime... It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.