Wealth & Money Quote by Barry Goldwater

Goldwater’s line is engineered to land like a moral indictment, not a policy note. By calling taxpayers “criminals,” he flips the usual direction of blame: the state isn’t protecting order, it’s manufacturing lawbreakers. That’s the rhetorical trick. “Created” suggests people aren’t inherently dishonest; they’re cornered into illegality by a system so sprawling and punitive that ordinary compliance becomes a specialized skill. It’s less about Al Capone than about the middle-class filer staring down deductions, forms, and penalties and realizing a missed checkbox can carry the same word - criminal - as an actual violent offense.

The intent is also strategic. Goldwater isn’t merely arguing that taxes are too high; he’s attacking the legitimacy of federal authority by framing the income tax as a kind of soft coercion that corrodes civic trust. If the government defines normal life as suspect, citizens stop seeing law as a shared bargain and start seeing it as a trap. That’s a political story with a villain (bureaucracy) and an innocent victim (the average American), and it primes an audience to accept smaller government as self-defense, not ideology.

Context matters: mid-century conservatives were building a new language of anti-statism in the shadow of the New Deal and wartime expansion. Goldwater’s America is one where the federal government has gotten big enough to feel intimate - not just in factories and unions, but in your wallet, your paperwork, your private decisions. The quote works because it turns administrative complexity into a visceral feeling: humiliation, anxiety, resentment. It’s libertarianism written as a crime story.