Herbert Spencer Quotes

The power to tax is the power to destroy.

An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy.

The power to tax is the power to govern.

The power to tax is not the power to destroy.

The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it continues until it destroys.

The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. Under this Republic the rewards of industry belong to those who earn them.

Anyone who wants to see a very free world does not want government. I also don't like being extorted or being aggressed against by others.

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.

You should get to keep every dollar that you earn. That's your money. That's not the government's money.

If Parliament may take from me one shilling in the pound, what security have I for the other nineteen?

It is from the power of taxation being in the hands of those who can throw so great a part of it from their own shoulders, that it has raged without a check.

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay

Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

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

Our government, taxes, and ideas of freedom are already duplicates of the Old World. Our politicians determine how we should live our lives - and our individual liberties are sacrificed for the benefit of the Fatherland.

It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part.

No animal on the face of the earth could conceive of taxation. You and I work roughly six months a year to pay our local, state and federal taxes. If nothing else, this should convince you that animals are smarter than people.

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?

I've always considered the government taking one out of every two dollars I earn absolute tyranny.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

If you increase the sales tax... everybody would be taxed.

I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen.

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.

Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.

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.