Best Rothbard Quotes & Sayings

The drum-fire of propaganda that the Fed is manning the ramparts against the menace of inflation brought about by others is nothing less than a deceptive shell game. The culprit solely responsible for inflation, the Federal Reserve, is continually engaged in raising a hue-and-cry about 'inflation,' for which virtually everyone else in society seems to be responsible. What we are seeing is the old ploy by the robber who starts shouting 'Stop, thief!' and runs down the street pointing ahead at others. — Murray Rothbard

Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible 'anarchy', why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person? — Murray N. Rothbard

It is particularly odd that economists who profess to be champions of a free-market economy, should go to such twists and turns to avoid facing the plain fact: that gold, that scarce and valuable market-produced metal, has always been, and will continue to be, by far the best money for human society. — Murray Rothbard

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

The state has typically been a device for producing affluence for a few at the expense of many. — Murray Rothbard

If government manages to establish paper tickets or bank credit as money, as equivalent to gold grams or ounces, then the government, as dominant money-supplier, becomes free to create money costlessly and at will. As a result, this 'inflation' of the money supply destroys the value of the dollar or pound, drives up prices, cripples economic calculation, and hobbles and seriously damages the workings of the market economy. — Murray Rothbard

Placing the state in charge of moral principles is equivalent to putting the proverbial fox in charge of the chicken coop. — Murray Rothbard

One instance of this failure is the case of smoke, as well as air pollution generally. In so far as the outpouring of smoke by factories pollutes the air and damages the persons and property of others, it is an invasive act. It is equivalent to an act of vandalism and in a truly free society would have been punished after court action brought by the victims. Air pollution, then, is not an example of a defect in a system of absolute property rights, but of failure on the part of the government to preserve property rights. Note that the remedy, in a free society, is not the creation of an administrative State bureau to prescribe regulations for smoke control. The remedy is judicial action to punish and proscribe pollution damage to the person and property of others.48 In — Murray N. Rothbard

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

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

If taxes and government spending are both slashed, then the salutary result will be to lower the parasitic burden of government taxes and spending upon the productive activities of the private sector. — Murray Rothbard

The public sector can only feed off the private sector; it necessarily lives parasitically upon the private economy. But this means that the productive resources of society - far from satisfying the wants of consumers - are now directed, by compulsion, away from these wants and needs. The consumers are deliberately thwarted, and the resources of the economy diverted from them to those activities desire by the parasitic bureaucracy and politicians. — Murray Rothbard

Lacking the direct test of success or failure, the voter tends to turn, not to those politicians whose measures have the best chance of success, but to those with the ability to 'sell' their propaganda. Without grasping logical chains of deduction, the average voter will never be able to discover the error that the ruler makes. — Murray Rothbard

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

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

The Panic of 1819 exerted a profound effect on American economic thought. As the first great financial depression, similar to a modern expansion-depression pattern, the panic heightened interest in economic problems, and particularly those problems related to the causes and cures of depressed conditions. — Murray Rothbard

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

The libertarian creed ... offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, and a free-market economy. — Murray Rothbard

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

Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers ... Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker's employment; it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him. — Murray Rothbard

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

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

States have always needed intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable — Murray Rothbard

In fact, the libertarian would reason that the fact that human nature is a mixture of both good and evil provides its own particular argument in his favor. For if man is such a mixture, then the best societal framework is surely one in which evil is discouraged and the good encouraged. The libertarian maintains that the existence of the State apparatus provides a ready, swift channel for the exercise of evil, since the rulers of the State are thereby legitimated and can wield compulsion in ways that no one else is permitted to do. — Murray Rothbard

Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State - the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility) - must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.8, 9 Of — Murray N. Rothbard

In sum, freedom can run a monetary system as superbly as it runs the rest of the economy. Contrary to many writers, there is nothing special about money that requires extensive governmental dictation. Here, too, free men will best and most smoothly supply all their economic wants. For money as for all other activities of man, liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order. — Murray N. Rothbard

The best way to help the poor is to slash taxes and allow savings, investment, and creation of jobs to proceed unhampered. — Murray Rothbard

At the base of the Fed pyramid, and therefore of the bank system's creation of "money" in the sense of deposits, is the Fed's power to print legal tender money. But the Fed tries its best not to print cash but rather to "print" or create demand deposits, checking deposits, out of thin air, since its demand deposits constitute the reserves on top of which the commercial banks can pyramid a multiple creation of bank deposits, or "checkbook money." — Murray Rothbard

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

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

We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. — Murray Rothbard

We conclude, therefore, that determining the supply of money, like all other goods, is best left to the free market. Aside from the general moral and economic advantages of freedom over coercion, no dictated quantity of money will do the work better, and the free market will set the production of gold in accordance with its relative ability to satisfy the needs of consumers, as compared with all other productive goods.10 — Murray N. Rothbard

Many people believe that the free market, despite some admitted advantages, is a picture of disorder and chaos. Nothing is "planned," everything is haphazard. Government dictation, on the other hand, seems simple and orderly; decrees are handed down and they are obeyed. — Murray N. Rothbard

All action is an attempt to exchange a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory one. — Murray Rothbard

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

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

It is only in relation to state action that the interests of different men become welded into "classes," for state action must always privilege one or more groups and discriminate against others. The homogeneity emerges from the intervention of the government in society. Thus, under feudalism or other forms of "land monopoly" and arbitrary land allocation by the government, the feudal landlords, privileged by the state, become a "class' (or "caste" or "estate"). And the peasants, homogeneously exploited by state privilege, also become a class. For the former thus constitute a "ruling class" and the latter the "ruled. — Murray N. Rothbard

[T]he crucial question is not, as so many believe, whether property rights should be private or governmental, but rather whether the necessarily 'private' owners are legitimate owners or criminals. For ultimately, there is no entity called 'government'; there are only people forming themselves into groups called 'governments' and acting in a 'governmental' manner. All property is therefore always 'private'; the only and critical question is whether it should reside in the hands of criminals or of the proper and legitimate owners. — Murray Rothbard

The individual man, in introspecting the fact of his own consciousness, also discovers the primordial natural fact of his freedom: his freedom to choose, his freedom to use or not use his reason about any given subject. In short, the natural fact of his "free will." He also discovers the natural fact of his mind's command over his body and its actions: that is, of his natural ownership over his self. — Murray Rothbard

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. — Murray Rothbard

Modern economics is a set of formal models and equations purporting to fully determine human behaviour, at least in the economic realm. And there is no way that uncertainty can be compressed into determinate mathematical models. — Murray Rothbard

The expansionary operations of the Second Bank of the United States, coupled with its laxity toward insisting on specie payment by the state banks, impelled a further inflationary expansion of state banks on top of the spectacular enlargement of the central bank. Thus, the number of incorporated state banks rose from 232 in 1816 to 338 in 1818. — Murray Rothbard

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

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

The libertarian sees the State as a giant gang of organized criminals, who live off the theft called "taxation" and use the proceeds to kill, enslave, and generally push people around. Therefore, any property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. Any person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty. — Murray Rothbard

Briefly, the State is that organization
in society which attempts to maintain a
monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only
organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for
services rendered but by coercion. — Murray N. Rothbard

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

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

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

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

The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress. — Murray Rothbard

The successful entrepreneurs on the free market will be the ones most adept at anticipating future business conditions. Yet, the forecasting can never be perfect, and entrepreneurs will continue to differ in the success of their judgments. If this were not so, no profits or losses would ever be made in business. — Murray Rothbard

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

Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue from coercion, from taxation. — Murray Rothbard

The most extreme types, like Murray Rothbard, are at least honest. They'd like to eliminate highway taxes because they force you to pay for a road you may never drive on. As an alternative, they suggest that if you and I want to get somewhere, we should build a road there and charge people tolls on it. Just try generalizing that. Such a society couldn't survive, and even if it could, it would be so full of terror and hate that any human being would prefer to live in hell. — Noam Chomsky

Only the State legally obtains its revenue by coercion. — Murray Rothbard