Ben Franklin -On Taxes

“The remissness of our people in paying taxes is highly blamable, the unwillingness to pay them is still more so. Money, justly due from the people, is their creditors’ money, and no longer the money of the people, who, if they withhold it, should be compelled to pay. All property, indeed, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his match-coat, and other little acquisitions absolutely necessary for his subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public convention. Laws and customs made accumulation of property possible, the public therefore has the right to regulate the quantity and use of property. “All the property that is necessary to man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages.”