HUMPHREY'S WARNING: TAXES CANT STAY HIGH

At a press conference on the 1956 budget, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey warned that high taxes can restrict freedom. Said Humphrey:

I THINK there is a very definite and distinct limit to what this country can charge its taxpayers over an extended period. I think that it gets right back into what makes a democracy tick, and into what is the difference between a free country and a slave state.

The difference between a free country and a slave state;--in my point of view--is our individual incentive system, freedom of individual choice, our freedom of individual opportunity, that lets free men go out and work for an incentive and not because they are told to 'do it or else.' Our material incentive, not our spiritual incentive, is a money incentive, and that money incentive, if it is destroyed by too much taxation, if it is reduced so far that it isn't a real incentive, can destroy our whole freedom because that will destroy free activity. That means that if you don't get free activity, you have to have slave-state activity; you have to be told, and you are going to have a dictator to tell you.

I think things that contribute to the destruction of our free-incentive system are wrong. A trend against that free-incentive system is wrong, and should only be temporarily engaged in in the event that war or something of that kind requires it. Otherwise, it should be reduced.

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