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From Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia
The following quotation is often attributed to Thomas Jefferson:
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
No evidence has been found that Jefferson ever wrote this. The concept of taxing income was not unknown to Jefferson, but his writings on the topic of taxation indicate that he viewed taxation generally as a source of revenue for the government.
Further Sources
University of Virginia EText Center. Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government: Taxation and Fiscal Responsibility. Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government: Front Page
Retrieved from "http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/The_democracy_will_cease_to_exist" Category: Spurious Quotations
You wanna play "the founding fathers agreed with me" game? The fact is, the founding fathers had differing views. Lets even just stick with Jefferson himself:
On tax distribution:
"Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785. ME 19:18, Papers 8:682
Geometric progression is a faster rise than linear.
"Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1784. FE 4:15, Papers 7:557
"The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied. ... Our revenues liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings." --Thomas Jefferson to Thaddeus Kosciusko, 1811. ME 13:41
While now it is not only the rich who consume imported goods, Jefferson shows no obvious disdain for the rich supporting social services for the non-rich. He even calls it patriotic:
"The great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers." --Thomas Jefferson: 6th Annual Message, 1806. ME 3:423
And here:
"In fact, the poor man in this country who uses nothing but what is made within his own farm or family, or within the United States, pays not a farthing of tax to the General Government, but on his salt; and should we go into that manufacture as we ought to do, he will pay not one cent." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1811. ME 13:39
And you can see he is against taxation of imported goods used by the non-rich:
"I rejoice, as a moralist, at the prospect of a reduction of the duties on wine by our national legislature. It is an error to view a tax on that liquor as merely a tax on the rich. It is a prohibition of its use to the middling class of our citizens, and a condemnation of them to the poison of whiskey, which is desolating their houses. No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey. Fix but the duty at the rate of other merchandise, and we can drink wine here as cheap as we do grog; and who will not prefer it? Its extended use will carry health and comfort to a much enlarged circle. Everyone in easy circumstances (as the bulk of our citizens are) will prefer it to the poison to which they are now driven by their government. And the treasury itself will find that a penny apiece from a dozen, is more than a groat from a single one." --Thomas Jefferson to Jean Guillaume Hyde de Neuville, 1818. ME 15:178
Bluebeard has provided an excellent lesson for those who choose to use Google as their only source, or at least rely on the first response to their query.
Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry. – Thomas Jefferson
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. – Thomas Jefferson.
If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so. – Thomas Jefferson
Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry. – Thomas Jefferson
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the law," because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. – Thomas Jefferson
If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny. – Thomas Jefferson
The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but a swindling futurity on a large scale. – Thomas Jefferson
I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. – Thomas Jefferson
I believe the states can best govern our home concerns and the federal government our foreign ones. – Thomas Jefferson
i agree. but when you dont wana pay the workers and bring in illegals to replace them are they lazy? is that what the rich man calls working? i think that is called working it. getting rich by working it.
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