Bob Hope Quotes

People pay their licence fee in this country because people believe that we should have public service broadcast programming. Of course, there are lots of different ways you could do that.

If the government mandates anything with a price tag on it, then it ought to fund the project.

If the government can make money, what on earth does it collect taxes for you and me for? Why don't it make what money it wants, take the taxes out, and give the balance to us?

At the end of the day, philanthropy can only ever be an adjunct to what governments provide. And government coffers need to be replenished.

It was an interesting question as to whether the BBC had a future in the digital world, and what form of market failure could justify the licence fee system.

Our existing media system today is the direct result of government laws and subsidies that created it.

There was a time when the FCC tried to require a certain amount of television and media to be educational, a certain amount to be newsworthy and a certain amount of it to be public access.

The perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.

You have got to be willing to pay for the government you want.

A healthy national infrastructure requires not just competent engineers but also a government—and a public—willing to pay for it.

The power of taxing people and their property is essential to the very existence of government.

Your federal government needs your money so that it can perform vital services for you that you would not think up yourself in a million years.

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.

In the US, commercial interests stole the airwaves early on, before public broadcasters could get a stab at it. And the deal that was made with public broadcasting was, "Okay, we'll allow there to be a handful of public stations to do the educational programming that commercial broadcasters don't want to do, but the deal is they can't do anything that can generate an audience, anything that's commercially viable." Anything they do that could be commercially viable could be considered unfair competition to commercial interests and should only be on the commercial stations.

Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical.

There is nothing government can give you that it hasn't taken from you in the first place.

The Democrats believe that if God did not want them to raise taxes, He would not have created the Internal Revenue Service.

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.

Taxation is the legitimate support of government.

Funded by the government just means funded by the people. Government, by the way, has no money. It only takes money from the people. Sometimes people forget that that's really what occurs.

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

Throughout history governments have been chronically short of revenue. The reason should be clear: unlike you and me, governments do not produce useful goods and services that they can sell on the market; governments, rather than producing and selling services, live parasitically off the market and off society.

The theory of government I was taught says that government provides benefits, primarily security, to the entire population. In return we pay taxes. But lately the government has been a distributor of special privileges, taking money from some and giving it to others. America is now about evenly split between those who pay income taxes and those who consume them.

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.

When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that this additional money must be seized from Peter.