"I don't like the income tax. Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of 'from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs'. That's socialism. It's written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him". T. Coleman Andrews, Commissioner of Internal Revenue, May 25, 1956 in US. News & World Report
"The agency that is so strict on the way Americans keep their books cannot even pass a financial audit". Ted Stevens, Republican Senator from Alaska
"If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People." Thomas A. Edison
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power of money should be taken away from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.” Thomas Jefferson
"The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution. I am an enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but coin. If the American people allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” Thomas Jefferson
"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that "all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are preserved to the states or to the people. " ... To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill (chartering the first Bank of the United States), have not, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution." Thomas Jefferson - in opposition to the chartering of the first Bank of the United States (1791).
"The eyes of our citizens are not sufficiently open to the true cause of our distress. They ascribe them to everything but their true cause, the banking system; a system which if it could do good in any form is yet so certain of leading to abuse as to be utterly incompatible with the public safety and prosperity. The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the principles and form of our Constitution.” Thomas Jefferson
"The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but a swindling futurity on a large scale." Thomas Jefferson
"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 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.
"And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering...
"And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.” Thomas Jefferson
"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 debt, 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 calling and our creeds...we [will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." Thomas Jefferson
"The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction... I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity... is but swindling futurity on a large scale." Thomas Jefferson
"Liberals love to say things like, "We're just asking everyone to pay their fair share." But government is not about asking. It is about telling. The difference is fundamental. It is the difference between making love and being raped, between working for a living and being a slave. The Internal Revenue service is not asking anybody to do anything. It confiscates your assets and puts you behind bars if you don't pay." Thomas Sowell
"The Original Sin which brought us to the brink of bankruptcy and dictatorship was the Federal Income Tax Amendment and its illegitimate child, Federal Aid." Tom Anderson
"It is wrong to take half or more of what people earn; wrong to force some people to pay for the support of others, threatening them with jail if they refuse (are in "noncompliance”)." Tom Bethel
"... [the 16th Amendment] conferred no new power of taxation... [and]... prohibited the ... power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the be ginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged...". United States Supreme Court in Stanton v. Baltic Mining (1916)
"The Constitution prohibits any direct tax, unless in proportion to numbers as ascertained by the census..... [and] ... prohibits Congress from laying a direct tax on the revenue from property of the citizen without regard to state lines." United States Supreme Court in Pollack v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company (1895)
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
"Capital must protect itself in every way. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When through the process of law the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd. It is thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.” – U.S. Banker’s Association Magazine, 1924
"The IRS is under a legal obligation to follow their own regulations, procedures and precedents." See Vitarelli v. Boston Television Corp. v. F.C.C. 444 F.2d 841; Shell Oil Co. v. Federal Energy Regulatory Comm’n, 664 F.2d 79; Service v. Dulles, 354 U.S. of the Navy, 639 F.2d 1029; United States v. Shaunessey, 347 U.S. 260; International House v. N.L.R.B., 676 F.2d 906.
"No State shall... coin money; emit bills of credit; make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts...". United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 10, Clause 1
"When there's a single thief, it's robbery. When there are a thousand thieves, it's taxation." Vanya Cohen
"In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other." Voltaire (1764)
"Paper money eventually reaches its intrinsic value - zero." Voltaire
"When you pay social security taxes, you are in no way making provision for your own retirement. You are paying the pensions of those who are already retired. Once you understand this, you see that whether you will get the benefits you are counting on when you retire depends on whether Congress will levy enough taxes, borrow enough, or print enough money." W. Allen Wallis, former Chairman of the 1975 Advisory Council on Social Security, May27, 1976
"All we have to do now is to inform the public that the payment of social security taxes is voluntary and watch the mass exodus". Walter E. Williams, John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, January 24, 1996.
"The next revolution will be when those who work refuse to support those who don't." Walter Hickel
"Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks. The compelling issue to both conservatives and liberals is not whether it is legitimate for government to confiscate one's property to give to another, the debate is over the disposition of the pillage." Walter Williams
"What's "just" has been debated for centuries but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn *belongs* to you - and why?" Walter Williams
"The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on." Warren Buffett
"One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves and seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized everything. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State and more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic and social system." W. H. Chamberlin
"Political elections do not choose leaders of society. Rather, they are an exercise in which groups of people choose individuals who will assist them in looting other groups of individuals." William Anderson
"We are living in a sick society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them." William Comer
"Some of the same people who laugh at gypsy fortune tellers take economists seriously." William DeFoe
"If you would not confront your neighbor and demand his money at the point of a gun to solve every new problem that may appear in your life, you should not allow the government to do it for you." William E. Simon
"The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society. Historians know that both phenomena were especially marked in the declining eras of the Roman Empire in the West and of its successor state, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire." William Henry Chamberlin
"Money confers social and political power, naturally. Those who have more of it than others use their wealth to dominate or control other human beings who have little or none. But money also gives power to a secret self, enabling it to pursue its own self-gratification in a singular fashion…
"Money, therefore, contains a continuous illusion of immortal power – the psychic vehicle for defeating time itself by controlling the future. It is only an illusion; no mortal ever conquers time…
"Thus, on a psychic plane, the Wall Street investor accomplishes what the alchemist could not – creating gold from dross, real wealth from mere paper, a living organism from raw numbers…
To demystify the Federal Reserve, one first had to understand that money did not require religious faith or buried fantasies or impenetrable technicalities. Money was, above all, a political question – a matter of deliberate choices made by the state.” William Greider, Secrets of the Temple, pp. 235, 236, 238, 242
"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
"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets." Will Rogers
"I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." Winston Churchill
"Germany's unforgivable crime before WW2 was its attempt to loosen its economy out of the world trade system and to build up an independent exchange system from which the world-finance couldn't profit any more. ...We butchered the wrong pig". Winston Churchill (The Second World War - Bern, 1960).
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." Sir Winston Churchill
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." President Woodrow Wilson
"The Federal Reserve bank buys government bonds without one penny." Congressman Wright Patman, Congressional Record, Sept 30, 1941
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." W. Somerset Maugham
These statements were made during hearings of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, September 30, 1941.
Members of the Federal Reserve Board call themselves "Governors". Governor Eccles was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at the time of these hearings.
Congressman Patman: "How did you get the money to buy those two billion dollars worth of Government securities in 1933?"
Governor Eccles: "Out of the right to issue credit money."
Patman: "And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our Government’s credit?"
Eccles: "That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money."
Congressman Fletcher: "Chairman Eccles, when do you think there is a possibility of returning to a free and open market, instead of this pegged and artificially controlled financial market we now have?"
Governor Eccles: "Never, not in your lifetime or mine."
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