George H. Smith Quotes

Americans feared the Townshend Act for another reason: revenues raised form it were to be used to pay the salaries of colonial governors and judges. This proposal struck at the heart of a revered American tradition. Although the Crown appointed governors in all 11 colonies, their salaries were paid by the colonial legislatures. This ‘power of the purse’ enabled American assemblies to check the power of the governors and judges by withholding their salaries.

This version of social contract theory stipulated that the king could continue to demand allegiance only so long as he fulfills his part of the agreement. If he violates his trust—as Americans believed he had with the Coercive Acts—he ‘unkings’ himself and releases his subjects from their part of the deal. His subjects are thereby cast into a ‘state of nature’—that is, a society without government—and are then free to form a new government of their own choosing.

As Herbert Spencer was to point out in the following century, feudal serfs were required to turn over one-third of their produce to their overlord. This means that any citizen who is required to pay a tax rate greater than one-third is worse off in this respect than the lowly serf.

Religion has had the disastrous effect of placing vitally important concepts, such as morality, happiness and love, in a supernatural realm inaccessible to man’s mind and knowledge.

Intellectually, every man is an island unto himself; no man can assume the responsibility of thinking for another. The virtue of rationality thus entails intellectual independence and the willingness to assume responsibility for one’s beliefs, choices, and actions.

Taxes, then, are a necessary means for the maintenance of political power, so the laws, first and foremost, must enforce compulsory taxation.

The physical capacity to coerce others can never generate a moral obligation to obey the dictates of [government] power.

We can see why Jefferson focused on inalienable rights in his effort to fasten the charge of tyranny on the British government. The violation of inalienable rights was a defining characteristic of a tyrannical government, and only against such a government is revolution justified.

To enumerate the particular details—the sufficient conditions—of a good society is effectively to prohibit individuality and social change. A planned society, a society in which sufficient conditions are politically determined and coercively imposed, is ‘closed’ to the spontaneous innovations of free association. We see this in the utopian writings of Plato and his many admirers. A utopian society is a perfect society, one that has been carefully designed by a wise and beneficent lawgiver. Any deviation from perfection must necessarily be for the worse, so social change—which in this scheme is but another name for social degeneration—must be arrested at all costs. And this, in turn, requires the suppression of individuality. The individual’s pursuit of happiness—that powerful and unpredictable agent of social change—must be subordinated for the sake of a good society, as specified in the utopian blueprint of sufficient conditions.

Ironically perhaps, key elements in the Marxian criticism of differs little from a popular conservative complaint (though the same point is typically used for different purposes).

Taxes forcibly transfer wealth from producers to legislators, who justify their expropriations under cover of law.

The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty. And this shift from infallibilism to fallibilism has profound consequences not only for toleration, but also for the subordination of faith to reason and theology to philosophy.

[G]overnment should only concern itself with matters of justice (i.e. the protection of rights) while leaving more tangential matters to the voluntary decisions and actions of individuals.

Reason is not one tool of thought among many, it is the entire toolbox. To advocate that reason be discarded in some circumstances is to advocate that thinking be discarded—which leaves one in the position of attempting to do a job after throwing away the required instrument.

The Boston Tea Party has often been called a pivotal event that led to the American Revolution, but it would be more accurate to say that the British response was the true catalyst.