Top 100 Murray Rothbard Quotes
#1. Unlike the days of the gold standard, it is impossible for the Federal Reserve to go bankrupt; it holds the legal monopoly of counterfeiting (of creating money out of thin air) in the entire country.
Murray Rothbard
#2. I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation.
Murray Rothbard
#3. Money is the general medium of exchange. It is the thing for which all other goods are traded, the means of final payment for such goods on the market.
Murray Rothbard
#4. On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers.
Murray Rothbard
#5. The Keynesian prescription for unemployment rests on the persistence of a 'money illusion' among workers, i.e., on the belief that while, through unions and government, they will keep money wage rates from falling, they will also accept a fall in real wage rates via higher prices.
Murray Rothbard
#6. Just as no one is morally required to answer a robber truthfully when he asks if there are any valuables in one's house, so no one can be morally required to answer truthfully similar questions asked by the State, e.g., when filling out income tax returns.
Murray Rothbard
#7. It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.
Murray Rothbard
#8. The proper governmental policy in a depression is strict laissez-faire, including stringent budget slashing, and coupled perhaps with positive encouragement for credit contraction.
Murray Rothbard
#9. Gold was not selected arbitrarily by governments to be the monetary standard. Gold had developed for many centuries on the free market as the best money; as the commodity providing the most stable and desirable monetary medium.
Murray Rothbard
#10. As Ludwig von Mises conclusively demonstrated in 1912, money does not and cannot originate by order of the State or by some sort of social contract agreed upon by all citizens; it must always originate in the processes of the free market.
Murray Rothbard
#11. The politician and the government expert receive their revenues, not from service voluntarily purchased on the market, but from a compulsory levy on the populace. These officials, therefore, wholly lack the pecuniary incentive to care about serving the public properly and competently.
Murray Rothbard
#12. Gold and silver are always in demand, regardless of clime, century, or government in power. But public confidence in and, hence, demand for paper money depends on the ultimate confidence - or lack thereof - of the public in the viability of the issuing government.
Murray Rothbard
#13. In a sense, the market, by expecting a fall in prices, discounts that fall and makes it happen right away instead of later. Expectations speed up future price reactions.
Murray Rothbard
#14. We libertarians are not the spokesmen for any ethnic or economic class; we are the spokesmen for all classes, for all of the public; we strive to see all of these groups united, hand-in-hand, in opposition to the plundering and privileged minority that constitutes the rulers of the State.
Murray Rothbard
#15. Every man must have freedom, must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices, for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.
Murray Rothbard
#16. As 'Austrian' business cycle theory has pointed out, any bank credit inflation sets up conditions for boom-and-bust; there is no need for prices actually to rise.
Murray Rothbard
#17. Only individuals can desire and act. The existence of an institution such as government becomes meaningful only through influencing the actions of those individuals who are and those who are not considered as members.
Murray Rothbard
#18. The 'boom-bust' cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business.
Murray Rothbard
#19. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.
Murray Rothbard
#20. The libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles. And if he himself values his own goals so lightly, how highly will others value them.
Murray Rothbard
#21. The ingenious slogan that the public debt does not matter because 'we owe it to ourselves' is clearly absurd.
Murray Rothbard
#22. It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by those receipts.
Murray Rothbard
#23. On the market, all is harmony. But as soon as intervention appears and is established, conflict is created, for each may participate in a scramble to be a net gainer rather than a net loser - to be part of the invading team instead of one of the victims.
Murray Rothbard
#24. The important desideratum is freedom of the market; a country or region will often best develop, depending on conditions of resources or the market, by concentrating on one or two items and then exchanging them for other items produced elsewhere.
Murray Rothbard
#25. Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.
Murray Rothbard
#26. Liberty and morality had to win their way slowly over many centuries, until finally expanding liberty made possible the great technological advance of the Industrial Revolution and the flowering of modern capitalism.
Murray Rothbard
#27. The State lives by its very existence on the two-fold and pervasive employment of aggressive violence against the very liberty and property of individuals that it is supposed to be defending.
Murray Rothbard
#28. The majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.
Murray Rothbard
#29. An Atlas, whose back is bowed and whose hands are busy holding up the world, has no arms to lift to deal with his own defense. Increase his burdens and you will crush him ... This is our present posture ... This suggestions I make ... would ... conserve American lives for American ends.
Murray Rothbard
#30. Out of the bitter experiences of the panic of 1819 emerged the beginnings of the Jacksonian movement, dedicated to hard money, the eradication of fractional reserve banking in general, and of the Bank of the United States in particular.
Murray Rothbard
#31. Never have the world's moneys been so long cut off from their metallic roots.
Murray Rothbard
#32. Libertarians regard the state as the Supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public. All states everywhere, whether democratic, dictatorial, or monarchical, whether red, white, blue or brown.
Murray Rothbard
#33. The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is to inflate and to destroy the value of the currency.
Murray Rothbard
#34. Savings and investment are indissolubly linked. It is impossible to encourage one and discourage the other.
Murray Rothbard
#35. Monetary inflation not only raises prices and destroys the value of the currency unit; it also acts as a giant system of expropriation.
Murray Rothbard
#36. Only individuals have ends and can act to attain them. There are no such things as ends of or actions by 'groups,' 'collectives,' or 'States,' which do not take place as actions by various specific individuals.
Murray Rothbard
#37. If a man's free will to adopt ideas and values is inalienable, his freedom of action - his freedom to put these ideas into effect in the world - is not in such a fortunate condition.
Murray Rothbard
#38. The fundamental axiom, then, for the study of man is the existence of individual consciousness
Murray Rothbard
#39. Money ... is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, the state is able to gain unquestioned control over the unit of all accounts, the state will then be in a position to dominate the entire economic system, and the whole society.
Murray Rothbard
#40. In the panic of 1819, the protectionists stressed the lack of consumer markets abroad and the necessity for building up a market at home. The inflationists, on the other hand, stressed the shortage of money capital available to manufacturers as a cause of the crisis.
Murray Rothbard
#42. There is no need for government to intervene in money and prices because of changing population or for any other reason. The 'problem' of the proper supply of money is not a problem at all.
Murray Rothbard
#43. The best way to help the poor is to slash taxes and allow savings, investment, and creation of jobs to proceed unhampered.
Murray Rothbard
#44. Originally, Congress provided in 1793 that all foreign coins circulating in the United States be legal tender. Indeed, foreign coins have been estimated to form 80 percent of American domestic specie circulation in 1800.
Murray Rothbard
#45. An attempt by the Mongols to introduce paper money in Persia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries flopped because no one would accept it. The public had no confidence in the paper money despite the awesomely coercive decrees that always marked Mongol rule.
Murray Rothbard
#46. John Stuart was the quintessence of soft rather than hardcore, a woolly minded man of mush in striking contrast to his steel-edged father.
Murray Rothbard
#47. What ... can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.
Murray Rothbard
#48. By the 1890s, the leading Wall Street bankers were becoming increasingly disgruntled with their own creation, the National Banking System ... while the banking system was partially centralized under their leadership, it was not centralized enough.
Murray Rothbard
#49. The most famous and one of the most thoroughgoing opponents of bank credit was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson reacted to the panic of 1819 as a confirmation of his pessimistic views on banks.
Murray Rothbard
#50. The more the government intervenes to delay the market's adjustment, the longer and more grueling the depression will be, and the more difficult will be the road to complete recovery.
Murray Rothbard
#51. As the greatest and last major crisis before 1836, the panic of 1819 holds considerable interest for the study of business cycles and for the present day. It was an economy in transition, as it were, to a state where business cycles as we know them would develop.
Murray Rothbard
#52. What is so terrible about transaction costs? On what basis are they considered the ultimate evil, so that their minimization must override all other considerations of choice, freedom, and justice?
Murray Rothbard
#53. Falling prices through increased production is a wonderful long-run tendency of untrammeled capitalism.
Murray Rothbard
#54. Among intellectuals who consider themselves 'scientific,' the phrase 'the nature of man' is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull.
Murray Rothbard
#55. The picture of the free market is necessarily one of harmony and mutual benefit; the picture of State intervention is one of caste conflict, coercion, and exploitation.
Murray Rothbard
#56. The fact that natural-law theorists derive from the very nature of man a fixed structure of law independent of time and place, or of habit or authority or group norms, makes that law a mighty force for radical change.
Murray Rothbard
#57. Tied up with his dismissal of natural law is Hayek's continuous, and all-pervasive, attack on reason. Reason is his bete noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even contradictory standpoints, he opposes it.
Murray Rothbard
#58. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.
Murray Rothbard
#59. The freedom to speak is meaningless without the corollary freedom to keep silent.
Murray Rothbard
#60. Declines in specific industries can never ignite a general depression. Shifts in data will cause increases in activity in one field, declines in another.
Murray Rothbard
#61. Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments.
Murray Rothbard
#62. The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress.
Murray Rothbard
#63. Now judicial review, beloved by conservatives, can, of course, fulfill the excellent function of declaring government interventions and tyrannies unconstitutional. But it can also validate and legitimize the government in the eyes of the people by declaring these actions valid and constitutional.
Murray Rothbard
#64. Philosophically, I believe that libertarianism - and the wider creed of sound individualism of which libertarianism is a part - must rest on absolutism and deny relativism.
Murray Rothbard
#65. The costs of government are bound to be much higher than those of the free market ... The State cannot calculate well and therefore cannot gauge its costs accurately.
Murray Rothbard
#66. Since 1933, New Deal farm policy has continued and expanded, pursuing its grisly logic at the expense of the nation's consumers, year in and year out, in Democrat or Republican regimes, in good times and in bad.
Murray Rothbard
#67. Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the United States and abroad. Therefore, they have a vested interest in promoting deficits and in forcing taxpayers to redeem government debt.
Murray Rothbard
#68. Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue from coercion, from taxation.
Murray Rothbard
#69. Early economic theory was rooted in the Italian, French, and Spanish traditions, which were subjectivist oriented. Then it shifted onto the terrible path by Smith and Ricardo and the British classical tradition, which is 'objectivist' - values are in inherent in production.
Murray Rothbard
#70. I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.
Murray Rothbard
#71. Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences.
Murray Rothbard
#73. The very nature of interstate war puts innocent civilians into great jeopardy, especially with modern technology.
Murray Rothbard
#74. If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and ... try freedom.
Murray Rothbard
#75. The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.
Murray Rothbard
#76. Play, as a consumers' good, is subject to the law of marginal utility, as are all goods, and the time spent in play will be balanced against the utility to be derived from other obtainable goods.
Murray Rothbard
#77. We have gotten to the point where everything the government does is counterproductive; the conclusion, of course, is that the government should do nothing at all, that is, should retire quickly from the monetary and economic scene and allow freedom and free markets to work.
Murray Rothbard
#78. The more these readjustments are delayed ... the longer the depression will have to last, and the longer complete recovery is postponed.
Murray Rothbard
#79. The more consistently Austrian School an economist is, the better a writer he will be.
Murray Rothbard
#80. It is human nature that when you see something work well, you do more of it. If, in its ceaseless quest for revenue, government sees a seemingly harmless method of raising funds without causing much inflation, it will grab on to it.
Murray Rothbard
#81. It is important to realize that gold and silver are international commodities and that, therefore, when not prohibited by government decree, foreign coins are perfectly capable of serving as standard moneys.
Murray Rothbard
#82. Gorbachev's stance contrasts admirably with the policy of the sainted Abraham Lincoln, who used massive force and mass murder to force the seceding Southern states to remain in the Union.
Murray Rothbard
#83. The avoidance of explicit ethical judgments leads political scientists to one overriding implicit value judgment - that in favor of the political status quo as it happens to prevail in any given society.
Murray Rothbard
#84. In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve the consumers; in government, the fittest are those most adept at wielding coercion and/or those most adroit at making demagogic appeals to the voting public.
Murray Rothbard
#85. In order to conquer the world of economics with his new theory, it was critical for Keynes to destroy his rivals within Cambridge itself. In his mind, he who controlled Cambridge controlled the world.
Murray Rothbard
#86. Governments have persistently tried their best to promote, encourage, and expand the circulation of bank and government paper, and to discourage the people's use of gold itself.
Murray Rothbard
#87. Economics has revealed a great truth about the natural law of human interaction: that not only is production essential to man's prosperity and survival, but so also is exchange.
Murray Rothbard
#88. The necessary consequence of an egalitarian program is the decidedly inegalitarian creation of a ruthless power elite.
Murray Rothbard
#89. In order to continue in office, any government (not simply a 'democratic' government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature.
Murray Rothbard
#90. Ultimately, there is no entity called 'government'; there are only people forming themselves into groups called 'governments' and acting in a 'governmental' manner.
Murray Rothbard
#91. Fractional reserve banks are sitting ducks and are always subject to contraction. When the banks' state of inherent bankruptcy is discovered, for example, people will tend to cash in their deposits, and the contractionary, deflationary pressure could be severe.
Murray Rothbard
#92. All action is an attempt to exchange a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory one.
Murray Rothbard
#93. The major reason for Keynes's rejection of communism was simply that he could scarcely identify with the grubby proletariat.
Murray Rothbard
#95. The natural law is, in essence, a profoundly 'radical' ethic, for it holds the existing status quo, which might grossly violate natural law, up to the unsparing and unyielding light of reason.
Murray Rothbard
#96. In short, the early receivers of the new money in this market chain of events gain at the expense of those who receive the money toward the end of the chain, and still worse losers are the people (e.g., those on fixed incomes such as annuities, interest, or pensions) who never receive the new money.
Murray Rothbard
#97. Absolute freedom need not be lost as the price we must pay for the advent of civilization. Man may achieve liberty and abundance, freedom and civilization.
Murray Rothbard
#98. After the Volcker Fund collapsed, I got another grant from the Lilly Endowment to do a history of the U.S., which I worked on from 1962-66. The original idea was to take the regular facts and put a libertarian assessment on everything.
Murray Rothbard
#99. Commercial banks - that is, fractional reserve banks - create money out of thin air. Essentially, they do it in the same way as counterfeiters.
Murray Rothbard
#100. All government operation is wasteful, inefficient, and serves the bureaucrat rather than the consumer.
Murray Rothbard
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