Frank Chodorov Quotes

Every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive.

There can be no such thing as 'fairness in taxation.' Taxation is nothing but organized theft, and the concept of a 'fair tax' is therefore every bit as absurd as that of 'fair theft.'

You don't pay taxes; they take them from your check. That's not a payment - that's a 'jack.

The most pernicious of all taxes are the arbitrary.

The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.

Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? ... Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.

Men must be either the slaves of duty, or the slaves of force.

If we import compulsion in matters of religion, there is no doubt that we shall be committing suicide.

No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.

It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.

Any imposition from without means compulsion. Such compulsion is repugnant to religion.

The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.

We ne'er can be Made happy by compulsion.

What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.

Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty.

If philanthropy is not voluntary, it destroys liberty and justice. The law can give nothing that has not first been taken from its owner.

It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something.

Coercion or compulsion never brings about growth. It is freedom that accelerates evolution.

It’s been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity - than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation.

What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

The federal government has taken too much tax money from the people, too much authority from the states, and too much liberty with the Constitution.

Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different, but the result would once again be disaster. What happened in America was really round two of those wars - the civil war of the British Empire, with the Hanoverians playing the part of the Stuarts, and the Americans the heirs of the revolutionaries, of Cromwell and of William III, the inheritors of a true British liberty, that had somehow got lost in its own motherland.

[Libertarians] don't denounce what the state does, they just object to who's doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don't quibble over their coercers' credentials. If you can't pay or don't want to, you don't much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration.

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.