Monday, April 18, 2005

A few words on taxes....

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
--Benjamin Franklin

“The whole idea of government is this: if enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.”
--P.J. O’Rourke

“Lord, the money we do spend on government, and it’s not a bit better than the government that we got for one-third the money twenty years ago,”
--Will Rogers

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.”
--Alexander Tyler (about the fall of the Athenian Republic)

Just a little food for thought.

Thanks to Rottie for pointing me to thse these (and a lot more collected by one James Hudnall- but these are my favorites).

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