Wealth & Money Quote by Alan Greenspan

Greenspan’s line has the clean menace of a bumper sticker with a PhD: a seven-word rule that pretends to be physics. Its intent is to turn taxation from a moral or political argument into a behavioral one. Don’t ask what a society owes itself; ask what incentives do. The formulation is deliberately mechanical: “Whatever you tax” collapses a messy world of brackets, loopholes, and enforcement into a single lever, and “you get less of” frames people as predictable responders, not citizens with competing values.

The subtext is a warning shot at policymakers who treat taxes as painless revenue. If you tax income, you discourage work; if you tax investment, you chill risk; if you tax cigarettes, you reduce smoking. That last example is where the line quietly overreaches, because it’s true enough to feel universal, but only in a narrow, econ-101 sense. Sometimes “getting less” is the point (pollution taxes), sometimes demand barely budges (inelastic necessities), and sometimes you get different behavior rather than less behavior (income shifted into capital gains, profits booked offshore).

Context matters: Greenspan’s worldview was forged in an era that lionized market signals and distrusted government’s ability to steer without collateral damage. The quote functions as a rhetorical shield for tax restraint and, by extension, smaller government. Its power is its simplicity; its risk is that it smuggles ideology as inevitability, treating democratic choices as if they were just supply-and-demand equations.