If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat andin our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors andour amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people ofEngland are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteenhours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these tothe government for their debts and daily expenses;And the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live,as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think,no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad toobtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains aroundthe necks of our fellow sufferers;And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departurefrom principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second,that second for a third, and so on ’til the bulk of the society isreduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilitiesleft but for sinning and suffering…And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxationfollows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression. Thomas Jefferson