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John Adams wrote in Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”
Adams’ argument suggests that financial transparency is needed to preserve freedom, but Thomas Jefferson makes this connection more explicit:
We might hope to see the finances of the Union as clear and intelligible as a merchant’s books, so that every member of Congress and every man of any mind in the Union should be able to comprehend them … and consequently to control them.
Jefferson’s statement can easily be applied to Utah by simply substituting the word “state” (or “county”) for the word “Union” and the phrase “the state Legislature”(or for the word “taxpayer”) for “Congress
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