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Edited on Thu May-12-11 10:43 AM by Leopolds Ghost
This has probably been posted on DU before, but I saw it on another blog and thought it deserved comment.
Ben Franklin wrote to Robert Morris as early as 1783:
"The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted.
They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law.
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All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it.
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Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of:
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But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
SO what Franklin said here is: (as noted by one commentator)
1) "There are sleaze bags here today that don't want to pay their taxes and come up with all sorts of excuses not to pay."
2) "The only property that is sacrosanct is what is needed for substance, EVERYTHING else is a contrivance from the community, who 'created it by law' and may 'dispose of it by law' " (paraphrase)
3) And if this is not acceptable terms, go live among the savages."
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Also, as the anti-authoritarian radicals of the Reformation noted in the 1600, (my favorites) there is no point in staging a tax revolt against a government they did not believe in, as it is "Caesar's money". Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
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