Fuel for the Holidays

I know I’ve done this before, but the holidays are upon us and with that, dear old Uncle Fred, the Republican and cousin Johnny, the Tea Party guy.

 

Keep these in your quiver.

 

Ben Franklin on the Estate Tax:    (and property in general)

“All Property except … (that) absolutely necessary for Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents (inheritance) and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and Uses of it.”…..President George Washington did not enact an estate tax, but his successor, President John Adams, did in 1797

 

Thomas Jefferson on the Flat Tax (and, possibly, basic income)

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 or property in geometrical progression as they rise

And on property:  The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed.

 

Adam Smith on lobbies, and possibly, the Chamber of Commerce:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent    such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render then necessary.

Adam Smith on a Living Wage

 

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation

Adam Smith on Poverty (and those poor people on welfare with their cell phones and flat screen tv sets

‘By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in publick without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty, which, it is presumed, no body can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.’

And finally, Adam Smith on Regulations

“When the regulation…is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters”