A Couple Thoughts on Taxation and Government Spending

"But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."

-- Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author. Source: "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)


"So low and hopeless are the finances of the United States, that, the year before last Congress was obliged to borrow money even, to pay the interest of the principal which we had borrowed before. This wretched resource of turning interest into principal, is the most humiliating and disgraceful measure that a nation could take, and approximates with rapidity to absolute ruin: Yet it is the inevitable and certain consequence of such a system as the existing Confederation."

-- William Richardson Davie (1756-1820) Governor of North Carolina (1798-1799), North Carolina delegate to the 1787-88 Constitutional Convention Source: speech in the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of North-Carolina, Convened at Hillsborough, on Monday the 21st Day of July, 1788, for the Purpose of Deliberating and Determining on the Constitution Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia, the 17th Day of September, 1787: To Which is Prefixed the Said Constitution (Edenton, N.C.: Hodge and Wills, 1789).