Murray Rothbard

“Savings and investment are indissolubly linked. It is impossible to encourage one and discourage the other.”

“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.”

“There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.”

“Hoover had prevented 'an immediate attack upon wages as a basis of maintaining profits,' but the result of wiping out profits and maintaining artificial wage rates was chronic, unprecedented depression.”

“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.”

“I do not go so far as the extreme male 'sexists' who contend that women should confine themselves to the home and children and that any search for alternative careers is unnatural. On the other hand, I do not see much more support for the opposite contention that domestic-type women are violating their natures.”

“To deprecate human reason by saying that none of us is or can be omniscient is absurd, for it takes an impossible standard as the judge of a possible and real condition. All of our knowledge we get from the exercise of our reason; to say that no man can be God and know everything is to take an irrational standard of evaluation.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The major reason for Keynes's rejection of communism was simply that he could scarcely identify with the grubby proletariat.”

“The underconsumptionist of 1819 believed that consumption would be stimulated by tariffs, while the underconsumptionist of a later day urged monetary expansion as the remedy. On the other hand, the remedy proposed for the shortage of money capital was monetary inflation in 1819, encouragement of savings and thrift in the 1930s.”

“The State has invariably shown a striking talent for the expansion of its powers beyond any limits that might be imposed upon it.”

“A robber who justified his theft by saying that he really helped his victims, by his spending giving a boost to retail trade, would find few converts; but when this theory is clothed in Keynesian equations and impressive references to the 'multiplier effect,' it unfortunately carries more conviction.”

“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.”