Some thoughts about money and the government from Ayn Rand in honor of Tax Day

• The money will go into channels that will carry it, not to the most productive, but to the most corrupt. By the standards of our time, the man who has the least to offer is the man who wins. 

• Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free. 

• If people are in need, we've got to seize the things first and talk about it afterwards. 

• You want me to provide the jobs, and you want to make it impossible for me to have any jobs to provide.

• Money is made--before it can me looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced. 

• …the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

• Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not be rich long.

• Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they have passed a law to disarm them.

• Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed.

• There is no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws…But, just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted--and you create a nation of lawbreakers--and then you cash in on guilt.

• The public may curtail my profits any time it wishes--by refusing to buy my product…Any other method of curtailing profits is the method of looters--and I recognize it as such.

• When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done today, then any act of honor or restitution has to be hidden underground.

• After all, it doesn't make any difference to the poor whether their livelihood is at the mercy of an industrialist or a bureaucrat.

• Who are you to stand against the government? Who are you, you miserable little office rat, to judge national policies and hold opinions of your own? Do you think the country has time to bother about your opinions, your wishes or your precious little conscience?

• Our modern laws are elastic and open to interpretation according to…circumstances.

• There's no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or idleness or pulling stick-ups for a living.

• …money inside a man's pocket had the power to turn into confidence inside his mind.

• Are you thinking that death and taxes are our only certainty, Mr. Readen? Well, there's nothing I can do about the first, but if I lift the burden of the second, men might learn to see the connection between the two and what a longer, happier life they have the power to achieve. They might learn to hold, not death and taxes, but life and production as their two absolutes and as the base of their moral code.