A 'Nutter Tax

We want our damn money, you owe it, we want it, and I plan to collect it.

 Mayor Michael Nutter (July 2010)

Payment and Cost

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Albert Einstein

Legal Plunder

When plunder has become a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frédéric Bastiat (The Law, 1850)

A New Era of Taxes

Your father made our yoke hard; now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke which he put on us, and we will serve you.

The People of Israel to King Rehoboam, son of Solomon.  1 King 12:4

Jefferson and Taxation

To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval (1816)

Definitions:

• Profusion: Extravagence, Lavish expenditure

Jefferson on Happyness

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy." 

Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper (1802)