Politics & Power Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken isn’t warning you about taxes so much as he’s skewering the pieties that make them politically painless: the fantasy that government revenue is a swap, not an accumulation. The line works because it refuses the polite bookkeeping metaphor of public finance and replaces it with a barnyard image of extraction. “Milking” turns the taxpayer into livestock: useful, routinely handled, and never consulted about the schedule. It’s insult-as-clarification, Mencken’s specialty.

The specific intent is to puncture the reformer’s promise embedded in every “new” tax or fee: that it will modernize, streamline, or replace something outdated. Mencken claims the opposite logic is the real operating system. A fresh levy doesn’t retire the old one; it expands the menu. That’s not just cynicism for sport. It’s an argument about incentives: once a revenue stream exists, it creates constituencies, bureaucracies, and expectations that make repeal politically costly. Government can innovate in collection faster than it can undo itself.

Subtextually, Mencken is also mocking the language that sanitizes the act. “A new source of taxation is found” sounds like discovery, like a natural resource uncovered by experts. He snaps it back to agency: politicians choosing “two ways” to do one thing, and doing it to “the taxpayer,” a role reduced to paying. Written in an era of expanding federal power, professionalized administration, and proliferating excise and income taxes, the jab lands on a public newly told that complexity equals progress.

It’s not anti-government theory dressed up as a quip; it’s a diagnosis of how “temporary” becomes permanent, and how novelty in policy often masks simple appetite.