From Associate Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his dissenting opinion in Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue (1927):
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society …
Bullshit. Governments extracting money from their citizens using coercive force is not civilized, it is its antithesis: theft. There is no immutable law of the universe that dictates that a government could never be so small, so constrained, and so respected by its citizens that some way could not be devised to voluntarily fund it. It has yet to be accomplished, but it is possible. Happy Tax Day, serfs. It will be another month or two before average taxpayers reaches Tax Freedom Day, the day when they satisfy all their obligations to federal, state, and local governments (plus another month or two if you add in the implied obligation to pay off governmental debt).
