Wealth & Money Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley’s line lands like a genteel letter opener turned shiv: violence invoked in a sentence dressed up as polite preference. The specific intent isn’t literal electrocution; it’s rhetorical overkill designed to delegitimize a whole moral vocabulary. By picking on the word "fair", Buckley targets not a tax rate but the premise that taxation should answer to egalitarian ethics. He’s saying: the moment you smuggle "fairness" into income tax policy, you’ve already biased the argument toward redistribution, away from first principles like property rights, incentives, and constitutional limits.

The subtext is classic Buckleyan combat: elites should argue in the language of rigor, not sentiment. "Fair" is framed as a squishy shibboleth, a conversational cheat code that lets progressives claim the high ground without defining their terms. Buckley’s mock-brutality exposes what he sees as the coercive core of progressive taxation: if the state can take more because it feels "fair", then "fair" becomes a moral solvent that dissolves constraints on government power. The joke is that he’s accusing his opponents of emotional blackmail while using emotional shock as his own weapon.

Context matters. Buckley was the house stylist of postwar American conservatism, shaping a movement that treated mid-century liberalism as both complacent and morally presumptuous. In that milieu, tax debates weren’t spreadsheets; they were arguments about what kind of country America was allowed to be. The barb works because it performs certainty. It doesn’t invite deliberation; it dares you to defend your favorite word under a spotlight hot enough to make it look like propaganda.