Posted on 03/23/2010 4:11:00 AM PDT by Scanian
A liberal acquaintance of mine likes to say that "taxes are the price we pay for civilization." He would, for he's a retired professor from a government university.
He didn't think this up on his own, of course. His soundbite is a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by Progressive Republican President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902. Holmes also said, "I like taxes. With them I buy civilization."
Up 'til now, I had failed to come up with a retort to this challenge. But the other day, while awake at 4:00 am (that peculiar time for inspiration), I found my answer.
No. Taxes are not the price of civilization. Taxes are the Cost of Compulsion. Taxing is just what governments do, all of them, from the grandest continental power to the meanest guerrilla band taxing the villagers in its jungle hideaway.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Progressives and their facilitators (a media that has abdicated their responsibility to America) are the greatest threat to justice and freedom the US has yet faced. And the cost of failure in defeating the progressives is the destruction of the United States.
You can not tax yourself into prosperity!!
Taxes are the barometer of tyranny!
PATRIOTS:Scorn and defiance; slight regard, contempt,
And any thing that may not misbecome
The mighty sender, do we prize you at.
Adapted from HENRY V
If taxes are the price of civilization, we’re not getting our money’s worth.
“taxes are the price we pay for civilization.”
It doesn’t matter how much we pay in taxes, the Democrats will always spend more than that to suit themselves. Which is why we are a debtor nation with nearly no credit.
You call this civilization? Seems to me, the country gets more uncivilized every year. Does the professor want to achieve civilization by paying the barbarians? History suggests that doesn’t work.
Holmes was a smart guy. Taxes in his day were miniscule. And all of the other USA freedoms were driving a juggernaut that soon became a colossus and covered up the downsides to all of it. He probably couldn’t see forward to the perversions a “few” taxes “here and there” would eventually cause. I’m sure with the benefit of hindsight, and utter embarrassment at what they did, he, Teddy and the rest of the gang would take most of it all back now.
Taxes are theft. There’s nothing “civilized” about theft. It’s a crime straight from the jungle. Beasts regularly steal the fruits of another’s labor; the spoils go only to the strong. In becoming civilized, we impose a sense of equity on that feral tableau, and erect institutions to protect a man’s property against those who would prey on it. Where those very institutions themselves become predators, we edge closer to the jungle, not the campfire.
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