The Federal Government should keep estate taxes as a reserve in times of national stress. All prior inheritance taxes have been war taxes; and it is only now that it is proposed to destroy this reserve in times when revenues from other sources are adequate and even in excess of the Nation's needs. Such a course of action is not only thoroughly unsound but borders on economic suicide.
In considering a revision of estate taxes, there should be eliminated any question of levying the tax as a means of punishing wealth or as in some way for the social good of our civilization…The theory upon which this country was founded is equality of opportunity. So long as a man uses his abilities within the bounds of the moral sense of the community, monetary success is not a crime, but on the contrary adds to the total wealth of the country and to an increase in the standard of living as a whole.
[Taxing the rich] was supported by the Socialist party, the Populist party, and by the Democratic party with a few honorable exceptions, simply as a means of re-distributing the wealth.
The child will become a very dominant factor in the household and might refuse perhaps to do chores before six a.m. or after seven p.m. or to perform any labor.
We have no authority until the meat becomes commerce. You see we have a right to control commerce, but not manufacture. I have the belief that it would be better if the Federal Government had general power to enact police powers for the protection of the people against impure and unwholesome foods, if it could stop with that…There is not one single thing in the Federal Constitution that expressly confers upon Congress any police power whatever, and by police power I mean the power to enact laws for the preservation of the public health, the public morals, and the public peace.
I know those packing houses as well as I know the corridors of the capitol [i.e.: not particularly well, he only served one term in DC]...there is not a kitchen of a rich man in this city, or any other, that is any cleaner, if it is as clean, as those places...Of course, you know the sort of men many of the laborers in the packing houses are—foreigners of a low grade of intelligence...If those men happen to spit, they are likely to spit, but it doesn’t go on the meat.
Such accidents are little short of deliberate suicide. No legislation can reach such cases as this.
It is but the natural course of mining events that men should be injured and killed by accidents.
[This is] Class legislation and attempts of the majority to spoliate private property [that] would ultimately wreck the American republic.
[This tax is based upon] principals as communistic, socialistic—what shall I call them—populistic as ever have been addressed to any political assembly in the world.
