Daniel Hannan Quotes

Government can’t deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch.

I mean, the Obama position has been, 'We think government ought to be spending this money, not the people who earn it.'

Israel's middle class is paying for those below it, and that's fine, but also for those who are above it, and that's very wrong.

Too many people on the Left think that, when you move a chunk of money away from people for entitlements, that the money magically reappears and that discretionary spending will be unaffected.

A liberal is a man who is willing to spend somebody else's money.

Government has really been growing, a lot of largesse, but the people in the real world aren't. And that's what has to change. Government has no conformity at all with the real world.

What the government gives it must first take away.

Any government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you're going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to - to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government.

Government spending is always a “tax” burden on the American people and is never equally or fairly distributed. The poor and low-middle income workers always suffer the most from the deceitful tax of inflation and borrowing.

Our enormous surplus revenues are illogical and oppressive.

Big government doesn't help the middle class, it buries it.

So if we are really concerned about generating more taxes, we ought to be investing in our people, not taking away the kinds of resources that contribute to their ability to become greater taxpayers in this country.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

I've seen it with my own eyes: When government takes money from the poor and the middle class, everyone suffers.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Western–style redistributive programs-progressive taxation, social security, unemployment insurance-should be encouraged, but at least in the short run, they have limited potential. There simply is not enough to tax, and nearly no one can be trusted to transfer revenues.

Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks.

The great vice of democracy --- a vice which is exacting a bitter retribution from it at this moment - is that for a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors, as if somewhere there was somebody else's wealth and somebody else's effort on which we could thrive.

We have a dangerous tendency. Roughly half the people in the country pay little of no taxes. These people who are disproportionate beneficiaries of government programs are in favor of more government programs.

A mature welfare state is always broke.

The great middle class basically pays the bills of our society through the taxes.

A public debt is a public curse and in a representative government greater than any other.

The more we spend on social spending the more we create an appetite for more social spending.

The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt… Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.