Politics & Power Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s genius here is the way he weaponizes a comforting word - “progress” - by agreeing with it so emphatically that the agreement becomes an indictment. “Unquestionably” reads like a gavel strike: case closed, no debate. Then he flips the exhibit. Progress, in his telling, isn’t higher ideals or better institutions; it’s a new arithmetic where the modern citizen’s gains are measured by how efficiently the state can invoice him.

The joke works because it’s built like a civic hymn and ends like a bill collector. Mencken doesn’t argue that taxes are always bad or that wages should never stagnate; he mocks the cultural reflex to treat “progress” as self-justifying. That’s the subtext: Americans have been trained to confuse motion with improvement, bureaucracy with maturity, and national “advancement” with personal well-being.

Context matters. Mencken wrote in an era when the federal government’s reach and revenue capacity dramatically expanded: the income tax became permanent, wartime mobilizations normalized huge public budgets, and the modern administrative state thickened. Against that backdrop, his line isn’t a policy brief; it’s a scalpel aimed at public pieties. By comparing taxes not to contemporary wages but to what one “formerly got,” he dramatizes a disorienting shift in the social contract: the citizen no longer merely earns a living under government; he increasingly funds the machine that narrates itself as his benefactor.

Mencken’s cynicism is calibrated, not casual. The punchline lands because it suggests a darker progress: the steady professionalization of extraction, wrapped in the language of improvement, sold as inevitability.