Have you payed your Master?

Today is April 15, the day set aside to make sure that you have paid the income taxes that have been levied against you.

On his website today, Neal Boortz featured a quote by T. Coleman Andrew, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service for three years, from 1953 until 1955. Well, since I don't believe everything I read, I did a little research to find the source of the quote and find out who Mr. Andrew is.

The main points of his quote are that the income tax is bad because:

• It effectively nullifies the Fourth Amendment
  
• It robs our right to privacy
• It destroys the concept of private property rights
• There is no cap on the amount that can be confinscated
• It fuels class hatred
• It employs techniques and principles of communism and socialism
• It is oppressive and tyrannical in nature

Anyway, for your entertainment, a list of quotes that I have collected about the income tax over the years.

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

~ Frederic Bastiat

"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."

~ Will Rogers

"The taxpayer; that's someone who works for the federal government, but doesn't have to take a civil service examination."

~ Ronald Reagan

"We 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

"The point to remember is that what the government gives, it must first take away."

~ John S. Coleman

"A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money."

~ G. Gordon Liddy

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin."

~ Mark Twain

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constituion which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents..."

~ James Madison (Author of Constitution for those educated at government indocrtination centers)

"To lay with one hand the power of government on the property of the citizen, and with the other to bestow it on the favored individuals...is none the less robbery because it is ... called taxation."

~ US Supreme Court in Loan Association v. Topeka (1874)

"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

~ Robert A. Heinlein

"America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation."

~ Dr. Laurence J. Peter

"Congres can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay."

~ Milton Friedman

"The income tax has made more liars of the American people than golf has."

~ Will Rogers

"The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government."

~ Barry Goldwater

"When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income."

~ Plato

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

~ Albert Einstein

"Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery."

~ Calvin Coolidge

" A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right."

~ Anon.

"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed."

~ Robert A. Heinlein

"It would be a hard government that should tax its people one-tenth part of their income."

~ Benjamin Franklin (I wonder what kind of government taxes people half of their income?)

"You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what the death tax boils down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes and get reelected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice."

~ Thomas Sowell

"We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much."

~ Ronald Reagan

"The most laughable WHite House criticism is that tax cuts are a 'free lunch.' The American people's work created that money. Only in Washington could there be a belief that letting people keep more of what they create is a giveaway."

~ Forbes, August 26, 1996

"What does 'fair' mean? In the dictionary, it means that everyone has to do about the same. Ten percent of a million dollars is still ten times more than ten percent of a hundred thousand dollars, and twenty times more than ten percent of fifty thousand. But 'fairness' in the tax code has come to mean that we take all the money we can from successful people and dole it back ... and what do we end up with? We end up with a jobs program for bureaucrats, and accountants, and lawyers, and somewhere along the way the taxpaying citizens are just plain forgotten. I'll tell you what I think 'fair' means. I think it means we all bear the same burden in the same proportion. I think it means that the system not only allows, but encourages us to participate in the economy."

~ Tom Clancy

"The principle involved here is time-honored and true: and that is -- it's your money."

~ Robert Dole

"The purpose of a tax cut is to leave more money where it belongs -- in the hands of the working men and working women who earned it in the first place."

~ Robert Dole

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money."

~ Joseph Sobran

"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

"People who relieve others of their money with guns are called robbers. It does not alter the immorality of the act when the income transfer is carried out by government."

~ Cal Thomas

A solution to this problem. The Fair Tax.