If those who vote the supplies are the same persons who receive the supplies when voted, and are to account for the expenditure of those supplies to those who voted them, it is themselves accountable to themselves, and the Comedy of Errors concludes with the pantomime of Hush.
Paine criticizes the lack of accountability in government spending when the same individuals control both appropriation and expenditure.
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Man cannot, properly speaking, make circumstances for his purpose, but he always has it in his power to improve them when they occur, and this was the case in France.
The Parliaments on their part insisted that they had not only a right to remonstrate, but to reject; and on this ground they were always supported by the nation.
The object is not so much the produce of the tax as the justice of the measure.
It was become evident, that no constitution, worthy of being called by that name, could be established on anything less than a national ground.