Top 30 Austrian School Quotes
#1. To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano.
Henry Hazlitt
#2. If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.
Ludwig Von Mises
#3. Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.
Isabel Paterson
#4. There's a huge swath of humanity that has developed verbal abilities to extract resources from guilt-ridden people.
They used to be priests, and now they're leftists.
Stefan Molyneux
#6. The welfare of a people lies not in casting other peoples down but in peaceful collaboration.
Ludwig Von Mises
#7. No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.
Ludwig Von Mises
#8. Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.
Robert Higgs
#9. Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times.
Lawrence W. Reed
#10. It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.
Murray N. Rothbard
#11. It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#12. Freedom is the foundation for all wonderful things in life.
Jeffrey Tucker
#13. He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.
Ludwig Von Mises
#14. Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to steal for you.
Ron Paul
#15. The Austrian School came into existence when a bunch of Viennese rent-gouging landlords didn't want rent control on the rents they could gouge out of their tenants in old Vienna, so they hired a bunch of scribblers - and that's the Austrian School.
Webster Tarpley
#17. I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.
Albert Jay Nock
#18. Repeal the entire Banking Act of 1933, and Austrian School economists will cheer, especially if the current system were replaced by a 100%-reserve competitive banking with no central bank. That banking reform would give us a sound money system, meaning no more business cycle, bailouts, or inflation.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#19. Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract.
Jeffrey Tucker
#20. Here's something I still can't get over. Amazes and thrills me every time. I'm sitting here and want a certain book. So I search, click, and then I have the book. Every time, my heart does a little leap of joy. What a beautiful world the market is making.
Jeffrey Tucker
#21. Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's inhabitants, or subjects.
Murray N. Rothbard
#23. The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.
Isabel Paterson
#24. The more consistently Austrian School an economist is, the better a writer he will be.
Murray Rothbard
#25. It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost.
Murray N. Rothbard
#26. In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.
Albert Jay Nock
#27. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.
Frederic Bastiat
#28. Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.
Mark Skousen
#29. Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys.
Ludwig Von Mises
#30. No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire.
Lysander Spooner
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