".. Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith considered the relation of taxes to despotism and to prosperity. Montesquieu, in his The Spirit of Laws (1751) wrote:
The revenues of the state are a portion that each subject gives of his property in order to secure or to have the agreeable enjoyment of the remainder.
To fix these revenues in a proper manner, regard should be had both to the necessities of the state and those of the subject. The real wants of the people ought never to give way to the imaginary wants of the state.
Imaginary wants are those which flow from the passions, and from the weakness of the governors, from the charms of an extraordinary project, from the distempered desire of vain glory and from a certain impotency of mind incapable of withstanding the attacks of fancy. Often has it happened that ministers of a restless disposition, have imagined that the wants of the state were those of their own little and ignoble souls.
Montesquieu also wrote that liberty carries the seeds of its own destruction: “Liberty produces excessive taxes: the effect of excessive taxes is slavery.” .."
So liberty in 1782 produced excessive taxes not just in 1861 when the Morrill Act doubled tariff rates in the US (after 7 states had peacefully left), but at various times up until 1860 .. the "Tariff of Abominations" in 1832 was just the start of taxing one section of the country over another.
It is true that IF the South did NOT have healthy exports from which tariff revenue could be had, there would have been no Northern invasion of the South. Lincoln decided violence was the only way and in April 1861 called up 75,000 troops from every state except the seven that has seceded by that time AND call Congress into session MONTHS in advance ... July 4th 1861 .. which gave him plenty of time to use his new dictator to assemble a war machine and never gave peace a chance. That war was in effect, death by taxes.
Death by Taxes | Abbeville Institute
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