Quotes About Austrian Economics

#1. To the Austrian economics of subjectivity, time provides an objective foundation.

George Gilder

#2. It's great to be with you gun-toting, 10ther, pro-life, Austrian-economics, home-schooling, redoubt-living, Constitutionalist patriots this evening. I think that covers the SPLC's list.

Matt Shea

#3. 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

#4. No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire.

Lysander Spooner

#5. Free markets are the real people's revolution.

Jeffrey Tucker

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. The profit of the one is the profit of the other.

Frederic Bastiat

#11. The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.

Isabel Paterson

#12. It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost.

Murray N. Rothbard

#13. The government is a giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential.

Stefan Molyneux

#14. 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

#15. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.

Frederic Bastiat

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

Ludwig Von Mises

#19. Freedom is the foundation for all wonderful things in life.

Jeffrey Tucker

#20. 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

#21. I'm not into the whole Austrian type, strongly libertarian economics. I like more mainstream economics

Robert Sarvis

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. The welfare of a people lies not in casting other peoples down but in peaceful collaboration.

Ludwig Von Mises

#27. The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.

Frederic Bastiat

#28. The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.

Ludwig Von Mises

#29. 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

#30. Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status.

Isabel Paterson

#31. 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

#32. 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