Wealth & Money Quote by Mark Skousen

Skousen’s line is engineered as a moral inversion: taxes aren’t the admission fee to civilization, they’re the fine for not having built one. It’s a clever reframing because it steals the usual civic-virtue language of taxation and redeploys it as a diagnostic of social breakdown. The subtext is pure libertarian anthropology: in a truly “civilized” society, people would coordinate through norms, charity, markets, and voluntary institutions so effectively that coercive revenue collection would be almost unnecessary. If government has to take more, it’s not proof of collective ambition; it’s evidence of institutional failure elsewhere.

Notice the gradient he sketches: higher taxes equals greater failure, and central planning equals “complete defeat.” That’s not an empirical claim so much as a rhetorical escalator. By tying taxation to totalitarianism, he compresses a wide spectrum of welfare states, mixed economies, and democratic governance into a single cautionary arc. The word “price” smuggles in the idea of punishment; “failing” presumes we had a choice and blew it; “civilized world” turns a policy dispute into a civilizational test.

The context is the long postwar fight over the legitimacy of the modern state: New Deal/Great Society expansion on one side, Austrian and Chicago-school skepticism on the other. Skousen wants readers to feel that every tax increase is not merely a budget choice but an ethical retreat from consent. The provocation works because it offers a simple metric - tax levels - for a messy question: whether social problems demand public solutions or expose the limits of community and markets.