John Stuart Mill on Taxation: The Government versus the Community

John Stuart Mill remarked in 1861, in a widely read book on representative government, that "the interest of the government is to tax heavily; that of the community is, to be as little taxed as the necessary expenses of good government permit." Liberals distrusted statist interventions and looked to ratepayer self-interest as the best guarantee of a small state. The state itself was one of the interests lined up in the fight for resources, and fiscal reformers never let the public forget that fact.

--E.A. Heaman, introduction to Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 10.