However accurate or inaccurate the agency's numbers may be, tax law explicitly presumes that the IRS is always right -- and implicitly presumes that the taxpayer is always wrong -- in any dispute with the government. In many cases, the IRS introduces no evidence whatsoever of its charges; it merely asserts that a taxpayer had a certain amount of unreported income and therefore owes a proportionate amount in taxes, plus interest and penalties.

Once a person becomes a government dependent, his moral standing to resist the expansion of government power is fatally compromised.

Governments and citizens blend together only in the imaginations of political theorists. Government is, and always will be, an alien power over private citizens. There is no magic in a ballot box that makes government any less coercive.

The people = government doctrine is equivalent to political infantilism -- an agreement to pretend that the citizen's wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him.

America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. By trying to seize far more power than is necessary over American citizens, the federal government is destroying its own legitimacy. We face a choice not of anarchy or authoritarianism, but a choice of limited government or unlimited government .

The more people expect from government, the more biased they become against limiting government power.

If citizens wish to retain their liberty, they cannot assume that those who seek power over them are honest. Skepticism of government is one of the most important-and most forgotten-bulwarks of freedom.