Author: Redactor

Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive.

American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920).

Class after class of men have seen a large part of their employment taken from them by machinery, so that at the present time there is scarcely any demand for the labor which millions of men had to perform a century ago. And yet, in spite of this, the laborer gets higher wages than he did a century ago, and is as fully employed as he ever was. In the whole history of the contest we do not find a case of a general and permanent fall of wages from the introduction of machinery.

Simon Newcomb, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), p. 388.

The taxes with which we are familiar class themselves readily according to the basis on which they rest. 1. Capital. 2. Income. 3. Consumption. These may be considered as commensurate; Consumption being generally equal to Income, and Income the annual profit of Capital. A government may select either of these bases for the establishment of its system of taxation, and so frame it as to reach the faculties of every member of the society, and to draw from him his equal proportion of the public contributions; and, if this be correctly obtained, it is the perfection of the function of taxation. But when once a government has assumed its basis, to select and tax special articles from either of the other classes, is double taxation. For example, if the system be established on the basis of Income, and his just proportion on that scale has been already drawn from every one, to step into the field of Consumption and tax special articles in that, as broadcloth or homespun, wine or whiskey, a coach or a wagon, is doubly taxing the same article. For that portion of Income with which these articles are purchased, having already paid its tax as Income, to pay another tax on the thing it purchased, is paying twice for the same thing; it is an aggrievance on the citizens who use these articles in exoneration of those who do not, contrary to the most sacred of the duties of a government, to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.

Government is a very great consumer, living not on its profits but on its revenues.

M. Destutt Tracy, Traité de la volonté, English translation titled A Treatise on Political Economy (Georgetown, D.C.: Joseph Milligan; W. A. Rind & Co. Printers, 1817).