"The prince who takes from his subjects more than is necessary to maintain order and security does not thereby become richer; he merely becomes the instrument of their impoverishment, and in impoverishing them, he impoverishes himself. For the wealth of the sovereign flows from the wealth of the nation; and the nation that is bled dry has nothing left to give. The fiscal system of France has crossed this threshold: it no longer finances the state; it destroys the productive capacity from which alone the state can draw its revenues."

"A legitimate tax is simply the price of a service: the service of security, of justice, of the enforcement of contracts. Like any price, it should be proportional to the service rendered and agreed upon by the payer, at least implicitly. The tax that goes beyond this and finances the preferences, the ideals, or the projects of those in power is no longer a price; it is a tribute. And a tribute is a form of subjugation."

"The democratic legislature is constitutionally incapable of economy. It represents the living and does not represent the unborn. It can always find a majority willing to enjoy an expenditure and a minority willing to defer its payment. The deficit is therefore not an accident of democratic governance; it is its permanent tendency, restrained only by exceptional circumstances or by constitutional provisions that the democratic logic itself tends, over time, to erode."

"The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else. The deficit is the proof that this fiction has been extended to its logical extreme: we are trying to live not merely at the expense of our contemporaries, but at the expense of our descendants. This is not a policy; it is a postponed bankruptcy."

"The currency belongs to the community that uses it, not to the prince who mints it. The prince has the right to regulate its use; he does not have the right to alter its content for his own advantage. When he debases the coinage, he commits a theft: a theft from all those who hold the currency, a theft diffused across the entire community, and therefore a theft more difficult to identify and to resist than the simple plunder of an individual. It is for this reason that monetary debasement is the most dangerous of all the abuses of political power."

"The assignat was not money in any meaningful sense; it was a forced loan, imposed on all holders of currency, repayable at the pleasure of the government, and liquidated in the end at a fraction of its face value. It was, in other words, a tax: a hidden, regressive, unavoidable tax, falling most heavily on those least able to protect themselves by holding real assets."

"War is the continuation of taxation by other means. Just as the tax collector extracts wealth from the domestic population by force of law, the general extracts wealth from the foreign population by force of arms. The two operations differ in their legal status; they do not differ in their economic nature. Both consist in the transfer of resources from those who produced them to those who hold power over them."

"A region that wishes to join another country should be free to do so, just as a client is free to change his supplier. A community that wishes to manage its own affairs should be free to do so, just as an entrepreneur is free to set up his own business. The prohibition of secession is nothing other than a monopoly of territorial domination, as indefensible in principle as any other monopoly, and productive of the same evils: high prices, poor quality, and the permanent frustration of those who would prefer an alternative."