Famous Taxation Quotes

The most famous tax limitation of all is California's Proposition 13, which ushered in an era of state tax revolts starting in the 1970s. Proposition 13 has had significant and continuing negative effects on local governments' ability to raise and spend monies, as have many other states' tax-and-expenditure restrictions. That California cities have less fiscal authority seems not to be causally connected to their more recent popularity, however. San Francisco and Los Angeles, for instance, have both seen their popularity rise despite the limits on their taxing powers.

In the 1819 Supreme Court case of McCulloch vs Maryland, Chief justtice John Marshall is famously quoted, comparing the power to tax with the power to destroy. This case was brought by a bank seeking to fight the government's ability to tax it.

Whether it is popularly emphasized much or not, Catholic teaching in the famous encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII tracks Thomas Aquinas’s quote above very closely: “Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary” (22). Immediately after this passage in Rerum, the famous encyclical repeats Thomas’s above words. Taken together, all this underscores the Catholic call to public aid, not by heavy taxation but by private charity instead. The same paragraph in Rerum Novarum refines this concept even further: “Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind [which cannot be taxed!], has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others.