TAX, OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES AND THE AUSTRALIAN LEFT

An Australian reader comments on an Australian Labor Party hero:

In a recent major speech, Simon Crean, Federal Parliamentary leader of the Australian Labor party, quoted with approval the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who famously said: "When you pay taxes you buy civilisation". Of course when Holmes, who died in 1935, said that neither Australia or the US had anything like the tax rates imposed today. My guess is that Holmes paid a lesser slice of his pay packet to the government than most of us, and I doubt whether Crean would want Holmes sitting on that Australian Hign Court bench as Holmes was a strong advocate of "judicial restraint" and would have fought the judicial activism supported by the left today.

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