Honest opinion about government from James Bovard:
The Internal Revenue Service is the authoritarian means to paternalist ends. A government that is anxious to give alms to as many people as possible is even more anxious to commandeer their earnings. Increasingly, the average American's guilt or innocence is left to the eye of the tax auditor, not to the citizen's actual behavior. Federal tax policy is now largely oppression in the name of revenue maximization.
The U.S. Treasury Department defines a tax as "a compulsory payment for which no specific benefit is received in return." No matter how many taxes a person pays, or what politicians promise, the taxpayer is not irrevocably entitled to a single benefit from the government. The level of taxation is thus a stark measure of government's financial power over the individual–a precise gauge of the subjugation of the citizen to the financial demands of the state.
Lost Rights, 1994
A journalist and policy analyst, James Bovard has written for many magazines, including Newsweek, New Republic, and Reader's Digest. Among his writings are The Fair Trade Fraud (1991) and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994).
Quotation and short bio from The Quotable Conservative: The Giants of Conservatism on Liberty, Freedom, Individual Responsibility, and Traditional Values. Rod L. Evans and Irwin M. Berent, editors. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Publishing, 1996.