The taxes have reached their ultimate limit. How to deal with it?

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 244 to 246 (in French)
Jacques Bonhomme, June 20th, 1848

In this article, Frédéric Bastiat engages in a debate with Jacques Bonhomme who spends more than he earns. The latter is offended by the economic solutions offered to him and does not consider the increase of revenue nor the decrease of spending as an option. The only solution acceptable to him is to balance his budget through borrowing.

What the government was doing then is the same as what the government is doing today. Frédéric Bastiat considers that this is a fatal budgetary evolution that can only lead to crisis, despite the blindness of Jacques Bonhomme or of the governments since 1848. To the question he asks and that I choose to quote, politicians will retort that he was wrong and that taxes had not reached their ultimate limit because the same “policies” have been conducted for over 175 years now. To this, I would retort that there has been three Franco-German wars in 1870, 1914 and 1939, the last two being even world wars. To this, we can add some major economic crises that have been exposed as crises of capitalism. I allow myself to doubt about this. To announce that capitalism is responsible for the crises that the capitalists were warning about when they observed the slippage of governmental actions seems a bit facile and liberals have often reviewed the arguments in order to expose the mistakes and fallacies of the constructivists in explaining these crises, notably that of 1929 and that of 2007-2009.