Government should only protect individual; beyond that it should leave individuals free to cultivate themselves, and thereby generate spontaneous cul… - George H. Smith

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

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.

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.