Thomas Paine Quotes

The cohesive power of public plunder.

… every man who puts money into the hands of a "government" (so called), puts into its hands a sword which will be used against himself, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will.

While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.

The state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory that construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.

The payments which have been made into the Treasury show the very productive state of the public revenue.

They compelled the Portuguese traders to pay for water, wood, and even grass, and every possible pretext was invented for levying fines; and these were patiently submitted to so long as the slave-trade continued to flourish.

Taxes are the lifeblood of Government

The revenue of the state is the state.

An industrial state which was itself a producer would not find itself obliged to demand so much in taxes.

The people of Montana understand that you will never be able to take enough money from them and give it to the government to quench that thirst. The government will always spend more money.

There is no art which government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

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.

There cannot be a good tax nor a just one; every tax rests its case on compulsion.

Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.

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.

Taxes are the sinews of the state.

For government to give, it must first take away.

Who can dispute that the governments of the United States constitute the most voracious tax system in the history of mankind? In the year 2000, those governments succeeded in laying hands on more than $3 trillion - almost $11,000 each for the 275 million men, women, and children resident in the country. No other nation-state rakes in an amount even close to the U.S. total.

Well, fancy giving money to the Government! Might as well have put it down the drain. Fancy giving money to the Government! Nobody will see the stuff again. Well, they've not idea what money's for- Ten to one they'll start another war. I've heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor'! Fancy giving money to the Government!

Let us never forget this fundamental truth: The State has no source of money other than the money people themselves earn.

The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn't first take from someone else.

Whenever you try to do good with someone else's money, you are committed to using force. How can you do good with somebody else's money, unless you first take it away from them? The only way you can take it away from them is the threat of force: you have a policeman, tax collector, who comes and takes it from them.

The estate tax has been a disaster. First of all it's double taxation, some people could even say it's triple taxation.

If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing.