Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Considering that senior officials at the Internal Revenue Service are fully aware of the fact that there is no law currently in existence making a U.S. citizen liable for or required to pay either the income tax or the social security employment tax, only a truly generous citizen would, upon discovering this, continue to voluntarily donate these taxes to the government by allowing them to be withheld from his paycheck on a 100% voluntary W-4 withholding agreement. But, then again, the IRS would be dead in the water without the "voluntary (and docile) compliance" of employers and employees and has said so all along."

~ William Cash  

"In a recent conversation with an official at the Internal Revenue Service, I was amazed when he told me that 'If the taxpayers of this country ever discover that the IRS operates on 90% bluff the entire system will collapse' ."

~ Henry Bellmon  

"Fear is the key element for the IRS in achieving its mission.
Without fear, the IRS would have a difficult time maintaining
our so-called system of voluntary compliance..."

~ Santo Presti  

After the 16th Amendment was ratified, an income tax was imposed starting in 1913 with rates ranging from 1 percent to 7 percent with the top rate applying only to incomes in excess of $500,000. By 1916 that top rate had risen to 15 percent, on income in excess of $2,000,000. The top rate exceeded 90 percent at its peak in the early 1950s. The first 1040 form -- instructions and all -- took up only four pages. Today there are some 4,000 pages of tax forms and instructions. American workers and business are forced to spend more than 5.4 billion man-hours every year figuring out their taxes. Since those hours could be put to a more productive use, and almost surely would be in the absence of today’s incomprehensible tax code, the result is a large dead-weight output loss of some $200 billion each year. ... The IRS now has more enforcement personnel than the EPA, BATF, OSHA, FDA, and DEA combined. With its 115,000-man workforce, it has the power to search the property and financial documents of American citizens without a search warrant and to seize property from American citizens without a trial. It routinely does both. Economist James L. Payne has written a most revealing analysis of the IRS, a 1993 book entitled Costly Returns. He arrives at a stunning conclusion, the total cost to collect our federal taxes, including the effects on the economy as a whole adds up to an amazing 65 percent of all the tax dollars received annually. The U.S. tax system, says Payne, has produced hundreds of thousands of victims of erroneous IRS penalties, liens, levies, and tax advice. In answering taxpayer questions, for example, the IRS telephone information service has in previous years given about one-third of all callers -- as many as 8.5 million Americans -- the wrong answers to their questions. A 1987 General Accounting Office study found that 47 percent of a random sample of IRS correspondence -- including demands for payments -- contained errors. Incredibly a GAO audit of the IRS in 1993 found widespread evidence of financial malfeasance and gross negligence at the agency. The IRS could not account for 64 percent of its congressional appropriation!

~ Dr. Lawrence W. Reed  

"I have sat on many a promotion panel where the first question of panel members was 'How many seizures have you made?' "

~ Joseph R. Smith  

"Only the rare taxpayer would be likely to know that he could refuse to produce his records to IRS agents... Who would believe the ironic truth that the cooperative taxpayer fares much worse than the individual who relies upon his constitutional rights."

~ Judge Walter Joseph Cummings Jr.  

"The Act of Congress which we are impugning before you
is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and
is defended here upon principles as communistic, socialistic -
what shall I call them - populistic as ever have been addressed
to any political assembly in the world."

~ Joseph H. Choate  

"[The Income Tax is] a vicious, inequitable, unpopular, impolitic and socialist act."

~ New York Times  

"If Congress sees fit to impose a capitation, or other direct tax, it must be laid in proportion to the census; if Congress determines to impose duties, imposts, and excises, they must be uniform throughout the United States. These are not strictly limitations of power. They are rules prescribing the mode in which it shall be exercised. ... This review shows that personal property, contracts, occupations, and the like have never been regarded by Congress as proper subjects of direct tax."

~ Salmon P. Chase  

"It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore,
in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy
of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by
sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign
luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception,
the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well
after their own expence, and they may safely trust private
people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin
the state, that of their subjects never will."

~ Adam Smith  

"Government cannot make man richer,
but it can make him poorer."

~ Ludwig von Mises  

"Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot.
Others look on it as a cow they can milk.
Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon."

~ Sir Winston Churchill  

"We must not overlook the role that extremists play.
They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent."

~ Abraham Flexner  

"At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that
the individual man ... is the touchstone of value, and all society,
groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement
of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and
abiding practice of any western society."

~ Robert F. Kennedy  

"In matters of principle, stand like a rock;
in matters of taste, swim with the current."

~ Thomas Jefferson