Tax day has passed

In honor of tax day (which is also the birthday of the DFL, go figure) here are some quotes about government and taxes.

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
--Benjamin Franklin

“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 way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
--Vladimir Lenin

“A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny.”
--Calvin Coolidge

“The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that
the taxidermist leaves the skin.”
--Mark Twain

“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
--Ronald Reagan

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.”
--Alexander Tyler (about the fall of the Athenian Republic)

“The taxpayer: That’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take the civil service examination.”
--Ronald Reagan

“When a man spends his own money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about how much he spends and how he spends it. When a man spends his own money to buy something for someone else, he is still very careful about how much he spends, but somewhat less what he spends it on. When a man spends someone else’s money to buy something for himself, he is very careful about what he buys, but doesn’t care at all how much he spends. And when a man spends someone else’s money on someone else, he doesn’t care how much he spends or what he spends it on. And that’s government for you”
--Milton Friedman

http://jameshudnall.com/blog.php?/weblog/tax_day/

There are more but this is my personal favorites.