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Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.

Government spending is taxation. When you look at this, I've never heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity; let alone I've never heard of a poor person taxing himself into prosperity.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

The government, in my judgment, cannot create money; the government can give its note, like an individual, and the prospect of its being paid determines its value.

Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.

You can't have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble.