Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

Source: Thomas Jefferson

Topics: Government

If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.

Source: Attributed to George Washington during the Constitutional Convention

Topics: America, Heritage

Capital levies, inheritance and estate taxes, and income taxes are . . . self-defeating if carried to extremes.

It is one of the characteristic features of the market economy that the government does not interfere with the market phenomena and that its technical apparatus is so small that its maintenance absorbs only a modest fraction of the total sum of the individual citizens’ income. Then taxes are an appropriate vehicle for providing the funds needed by the government. They are appropriate because they are low and do not perceptibly disarrange production and consumption. If taxes grow beyond a moderate limit, they cease to be taxes and turn into devices for the destruction of the market economy....

[T]he true crux of the taxation issue is to be seen in the paradox that the more taxes increase, the more they undermine the market economy and concomitantly the system of taxation itself. Thus, the fact becomes manifest that ultimately the preservation of private property and confiscatory measures are incompatible: Every specific tax, as well as a nation’s whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.

Source: Ludwig von Mises
Human Action, pp. 740-741

Topics: Government, Limited; Taxes

I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

Source: Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:278

Topics: Citizenship; Responsibility

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree.

Source: Thomas Jefferson
Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782. ME 2:207

Topics: Government, Loss of Freedom

Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.”

Source: Thomas Jefferson to Littleton Waller Tazewell, 1805.

Topics: Government, Loss of Freedom; Responsibility

Light and liberty go together.

Source: Thomas Jefferson to Tench Coxe, 1795.

Topics: Education

Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.

Source: Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. Madison Version FE 4:480

Topics: Education

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;... whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

Source: Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789. ME 7:253

Topics: Responsibility

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