“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson (1813)
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"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant."
Both in England and on the Continent a graduated property tax (l’impôt progressif [progressive tax]) has been advocated, on the avowed ground that the state should use the instrument of taxation as a means of mitigating the inequalities of wealth.
I am as desirous as any one that means should be taken to diminish those inequalities, but not so as to relieve the prodigal at the expense of the prudent.
To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbours.
It is not the fortunes which are earned, but those which are unearned, that it is for the public good to place under limitation.
— John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848)
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Tags: economics, income inequality, income tax, job creation, john stuart mill, js mill, progressive tax, tax the rich
Twain was speaking against the government's attempt to regulate Osteopahy...the osteopaths/chiropractors had hoped he was a believer, but it turned out he thought bone-adjustment was a sham, yet defending people being free to choose for themselves.
Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffer, not the state.
— Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), address to the New York General Assembly (1901)
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The government that seems the most unwise, Oft goodness to the people best supplies; That which is meddling, touching everything, Will work but ill, and disappointment bring.
- When taxes are too high, people go hungry.
- When the government is too intrusive, people resist.
- When rulers take too much happiness, people gladly die.
Act for the people’s benefit. Trust them; leave them alone.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (The Way to Power) (500 BC)
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Tags: freedom, government, i ching, lao tzu, liberty, quotation, tao te ching, taoism
The federal government of the United States of America takes away between a fifth and a quarter of all our money every year. That is eight times the Islamic zakat, the almsgiving required of believers by the Koran; it is double the tithe of the medieval church and twice the royal tribute that the prophet Samuel warned the Israelites against when they wanted him to annount a ruler…
…remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody’s head.
Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot.
Thus I:
- in my role as citizen and voter
- am going to shoot you
- in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck
- if you don’t pay your fair share of the national tab.
Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, “Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?”
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"What world can afford this sort of thing for long? We are in an armaments race. Where will it lead us...At best, to robbing every people and nation on earth of the fruits of their own toil."
Every gun that is made,
every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies,
in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this:
a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war,
it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
— General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his speech The Chance for Peace (1953)
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Tags: eisenhower, military spending, neocons, peace, quotations, the military-industrial complex, the war on terror, war
Government programs are driven by greed, not altruism.
It is the selfish who demand that politicians take money from others, and redistribute it to themselves.
— KAZ Vorpal, But Now You Know (2011)
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Makework "stimulus" jobs are welfare, not employment
A private job pays for itself and more, a form of wealth creation that is self-sustaining;
But a government job only sucks at taxes, burdening the economy, until the money runs out.
— Kaz Vorpal
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I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.
In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
— Ben Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, 1776
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It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease.
Financial markets are the machines in which much of human welfare is decided; yet we know more about how our car engines work than about how our global financial system functions. We lurch from crisis to crisis. In a networked world, mayhem in one market spreads instantaneously to all others—and we have only the vaguest of notions how this happens, or how to regulate it.
So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but to shamans. We place control of the world’s largest economy in the hands of a few elderly men, the central bankers.
— Benoît Mandelbrot, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004)
Mandelbrot was also a brilliant mathematician, the father of Fractal Geometry
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The consequences arising from the continual accumulation of public debts in other countries ought to admonish us to be careful to prevent their growth in our own.
— John Adams, November 23rd, 1797, First Address to Congress
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Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food.
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-1785)
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A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither.
A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
– Milton Friedman, from Created Equal, Free to Choose television series
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Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.
The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
— James Madison, Political Observations, 1795
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I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.
The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager.
Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form.
— Calvin Coolidge, 1924 Inaugural Address
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Tags: deficit spending, federal debt, federal deficit, government spending, government waste, income tax, liberty, spending, taxation, taxes, waste fraud and abuse
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency.
Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded.
Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
– General Douglas MacArthur, A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (1965)
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Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, “If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Attributes” (1856)
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The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
– Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879
Why Workers Dislike Unions
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Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.
– Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Why Workers Dislike Unions
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Words of the Sentient 