Top 100 Rothbard Quotes

#1. Social power is the power over nature, the living standards achieved by men in mutual exchange. State power, as we have seen, is the coercive and parasitic seizure of this production - a draining of the fruits of society for the benefit of nonproductive (actually antiproductive) rulers.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #7313
#2. 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

Rothbard Quotes #7647
#3. War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, Taxation is Robbery.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #68217
#4. In the United States, after World War II, it took about two decades for the message to slowly seep in that inflation was going to be a permanent fact of the American way of life.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #68781
#5. 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

Rothbard Quotes #114463
#6. In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogans of "defense" and "emergency," it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #119850
#7. 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

Rothbard Quotes #143831
#8. 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

Rothbard Quotes #174198
#9. 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

Rothbard Quotes #189967
#10. 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

Rothbard Quotes #202200
#11. It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #205392
#12. 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

Rothbard Quotes #213011
#13. In his second Inaugural Address, on March 5, 1821, Monroe admitted at last to a general depression of prices, but only as a means of explaining the great decline in the federal revenue. Despite this, he asserted that the situation of America presented a 'gratifying spectacle.'

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #238117
#14. 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

Rothbard Quotes #239462
#15. 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

Rothbard Quotes #247657
#16. 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

Rothbard Quotes #266653
#17. 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

Rothbard Quotes #272544
#18. I want to make it clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that fiat money, once established on the ruins of gold, cannot then continue indefinitely on its own.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #281349
#19. Placing the state in charge of moral principles is equivalent to putting the proverbial fox in charge of the chicken coop.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #282508
#20. Scratch an egalitarian, and you will inevitably find a statist.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #285613
#21. Harold, the young kids out there are not going to be willing to go to the barricades in defense of lowered transaction costs.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #295080
#22. 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

Rothbard Quotes #297013
#23. 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

Rothbard Quotes #311878
#24. Where the questions concern governmental power in a sovereign nation, it is not possible to select an umpire who is outside government. Every national government, so long as it is a government, must have the final say on its own power.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #316890
#25. 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

Rothbard Quotes #320909
#26. 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

Rothbard Quotes #355214
#27. 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

Rothbard Quotes #362476
#28. The 'boom-bust' cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #376115
#29. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #385980
#30. Passports were originally created to provide safe conduct in time of war. During most of the eighteenth century it seldom occurred to Europeans to abandon their travels in a foreign country which their own was fighting.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #386561
#31. 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

Rothbard Quotes #396859
#32. The ingenious slogan that the public debt does not matter because 'we owe it to ourselves' is clearly absurd.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #397477
#33. 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

Rothbard Quotes #400663
#34. 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

Rothbard Quotes #405414
#35. Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism. Not only are they compatible, but you can't really have one without the other. True anarchism will be capitalism, and true capitalism will be anarchism

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #423242
#36. 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

Rothbard Quotes #423699
#37. 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

Rothbard Quotes #457783
#38. 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

Rothbard Quotes #461439
#39. 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

Rothbard Quotes #464900
#40. The majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #465381
#41. 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

Rothbard Quotes #471651
#42. If you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #478275
#43. It is clearly absurd to limit the term 'education' to a person's formal schooling.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #485622
#44. 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

Rothbard Quotes #492506
#45. The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #495370
#46. There can be no such thing as 'fairness in taxation.' Taxation is nothing but organized theft, and the concept of a 'fair tax' is therefore every bit as absurd as that of 'fair theft.'

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #497145
#47. Monetary expansion is a massive scheme of hidden redistribution.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #536045
#48. The contemporary political scientist believes that he can avoid the necessity of moral judgments and that he can help frame public policy without committing himself to any ethical position.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #539270
#49. States have always needed intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #549261
#50. 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

Rothbard Quotes #555833
#51. While the seeming independence of the federal judiciary has played a vital part in making its actions virtual Holy Writ for the bulk of the people, it is also and ever true that the judiciary is part and parcel of the government apparatus and appointed by the executive and legislative branches.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #560843
#52. Never have the world's moneys been so long cut off from their metallic roots.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #572263
#53. 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

Rothbard Quotes #573039
#54. The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is to inflate and to destroy the value of the currency.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #601873
#55. Savings and investment are indissolubly linked. It is impossible to encourage one and discourage the other.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #615266
#56. 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

Rothbard Quotes #629330
#57. The Jacksonians were libertarians, plain and simple. Their program and ideology were libertarian; they strongly favored free enterprise and free markets, but they just as strongly opposed special subsidies and monopoly privileges conveyed by government to business or to any other group.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #638545
#58. 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

Rothbard Quotes #642215
#59. If government wishes to see a depression ended as quickly as possible and the economy returned to normal prosperity, what course should it adopt? The first and clearest injunction is: Don't interfere with the market's adjustment process.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #664866
#60. 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

Rothbard Quotes #671908
#61. The fundamental axiom, then, for the study of man is the existence of individual consciousness

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #683955
#62. Soaking the rich would not only be profoundly immoral, it would drastically penalize the very virtues: thrift, business foresight, and investment, that have brought about our remarkable standard of living. It would truly be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #697453
#63. The great fact of individual difference and variability (that is, inequality) is evident from the long record of human experience: hence, the general recognition of the antihuman nature of a world of coerced uniformity.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #698702
#64. 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

Rothbard Quotes #709573
#65. 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

Rothbard Quotes #709813
#66. You don't need a treaty to have free trade.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #721744
#67. 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

Rothbard Quotes #739426
#68. The best way to help the poor is to slash taxes and allow savings, investment, and creation of jobs to proceed unhampered.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #751628
#69. The State is a gang of thieves writ large - the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #767549
#70. 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

Rothbard Quotes #767839
#71. Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial government of Massachusetts emitted a fiat paper issue in 1690.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #774687
#72. To be moral, an act must be free.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #781147
#73. 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

Rothbard Quotes #795528
#74. 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

Rothbard Quotes #796803
#75. What ... can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #800771
#76. 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

Rothbard Quotes #807631
#77. 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

Rothbard Quotes #812663
#78. This, by the way, is the welfare state in action: Its a whole bunch of special interest groups screwing consumers and taxpayers, and making them think they're really benefiting.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #817766
#79. 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

Rothbard Quotes #817935
#80. The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #837222
#81. Rights might be universal but their enforcement must be local.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #839236
#82. Inflation, being a fraudulent invasion of property, could not take place on the free market.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #847641
#83. The natural tendency of the state is inflation. This statement will shock those accustomed to viewing the state as a committee of the whole nation ardently dispensing the general welfare, but I think it nonetheless true.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #870848
#84. Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #880502
#85. Difference between me and people like Murray Rothbard is that, though I want to know what my ideal is, I think I also have to be willing to discuss changes that are less than ideal so long as they point me in that direction.

Milton Friedman

Rothbard Quotes #883445
#86. Compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #909479
#87. 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

Rothbard Quotes #926577
#88. 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

Rothbard Quotes #928711
#89. Every once in awhile the human race pauses in the job of botching its affairs and redeems itself by a noble work of the intellect.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #942413
#90. The number of men sitting at Atlanta and Leavenworth for revolting against the extortions of the government is always ten times as great as the number of government officials condemned for oppressing the taxpayers to their own gain. (Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy, pp.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #946968
#91. Falling prices through increased production is a wonderful long-run tendency of untrammeled capitalism.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #951256
#92. Leading the boom of 1838 were state governments, who, finding themselves with the unexpected windfall of a distributed surplus from the federal government, proceeded to spend the money wildly and borrow even more extravagantly on public works and other uneconomic forms of 'investment.'

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #957169
#93. 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

Rothbard Quotes #967296
#94. 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

Rothbard Quotes #969608
#95. 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

Rothbard Quotes #974985
#96. 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

Rothbard Quotes #976077
#97. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a "social contract"; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #980808
#98. 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

Rothbard Quotes #985804
#99. Positivism eliminates any kind of natural law principle - for example, that there are economic laws which can be transgressed only at your peril. With positivism, there is a tendency to leap into ad hoc economic theory.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #1000473
#100. The freedom to speak is meaningless without the corollary freedom to keep silent.

Murray Rothbard

Rothbard Quotes #1020566

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