Life & Wisdom Quote by William Feather

A neat little American joke with a bitter aftertaste: work hard, build something, live responsibly, and the system shows up with its hand out. Feather’s line turns the Horatio Alger script inside out. Instead of “energy, enterprise and thrift” leading to freedom or comfort, they lead to paperwork, penalties, and the quiet suspicion that success is a kind of civic misbehavior.

The intent is not policy nuance; it’s moral theater. Feather compresses a whole worldview into a single pivot word: “reward.” In the prosperity gospel of self-reliance, reward is supposed to be earned and personal. He swaps it for a collective claim, implying that government doesn’t just redistribute wealth, it hijacks the story people tell themselves about deservingness. The subtext is grievance dressed as common sense: the responsible are singled out because they’re visible, measurable, taxable. The irresponsible, by contrast, slip the net. Whether that’s true is beside the point; the line succeeds because it flatters the reader’s sense of being one of the diligent few.

Context matters. Feather lived through the income tax’s entrenchment, the New Deal’s expansion of the state, wartime taxation, and the postwar bureaucratic boom. For a certain middle-class striver, taxes became the most tangible symbol of modern government: not an abstraction, but an annual ritual of surrender. The quote weaponizes that ritual into a cultural critique - one that still travels well in an era where “makers vs. takers” remains a political shortcut. It’s punchy because it turns civic contribution into insult, and it dares you to laugh while you bristle.