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Smith saw that the federal government’s usurping the powers of the states would occur incrementally.

He was right up until 1860 when the original form of our government was overturned!

"The Federal Government is the creature of the States. It is not a party to the Constitution, but the result of it the creation of that agreement which was made by the States as parties. It is a mere agent, entrusted with limited powers for certain specific objects; which powers and objects are enumerated in the Constitution. Shall the agent be permitted to judge the extent of its own powers, without reference to his constituent? To a certain extent, he is compelled to do this, in the very act of exercising them, but always in subordination to the authority by whom his powers were conferred. If this were not so, the result would be, that the agent would possess every power which the agent could confer, notwithstanding the plainest and most express terms of the grant. This would be against all principle and all reason. If such a rule would prevail in regard to government, a written constitution would be the idlest thing imaginable. It would afford no barrier against the usurpations of the government, and no security for the rights and liberties of the people. If then the Federal Government has no authority to judge, in the last resort, of the extent of its own powers, with what propriety can it be said that a single department of that government may do so? Nay. It is said that this department may not only judge for itself, but for the other departments also. This is an absurdity as pernicious as it is gross and palpable. If the judiciary may determine the powers of the Federal Government, it may pronounce them either less or more than they really are. "

Abel Upshur Secretary of the Navy 1841-43

In saving the Union, I have destroyed the republic. Before me I have the Confederacy which I loathe. But behind me I have bankers which I fear.

Abraham Lincoln comment on the National Bank Act, February 1863

He believed that oppressive taxation would turn people against the federal government, something that was ameliorated by the invention of federal transfer payments. Can the people be successfully turned against an oppressive federal government, and how can the sugary lure of transfer payments be eliminated?

He is right yet again! The people ARE turned against the federal government by oppressive taxation but the events of 1913 have mad it quite difficult, if not impossible, for any citizen to know EXACTLY what he is really paying in taxes and that will never change until such time as we rid ourselves of the communist inspired, class warfare inducing, progressive income tax and go back to something more in line with what the founders envisioned!

"What the income tax does is lead the people of this country down a path to where actual control of their resources, which in the end is the control over their will, is handed off to the government. The government then manipulates that will in order to destroy the freedom of our electoral system through the income tax structure, and we call the resulting slavery a free system. In point of fact, it is not as the founders understood, and the only way to restore real freedom is to give people back control over the income that they earn so that they won‘t, at the voting booth and in other phony issues, be subject to that manipulation."

ALAN KEYES IS MAKING SENSE Television Show Monday, Jan. 28, 2002

"It is a signal advantage of taxes on articles of consumption that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit, which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end proposed - that is, an extension of the revenue. When applied to this object, the saying is as just as it is witty that, "in political arithmetic, two and two do not always make four." If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them.

Federalist #21

“The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, the quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to every other person, so that the tax payer is not put in the power of the tax gatherer.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776