Murray Rothbard quotes - page 2

All my life, it seems, I have hated the guts of Max Lerner. Now, make no mistake: there is nothing personal in this rancor. I have never met, nor have I ever had any personal dealings with, Max. No, my absolute loathing for Max Lerner is disinterested, cosmic in its grandeur. It's just that ever since I was a toddler, this ugly homunculus, this pretentious jackass, has been there, towering over the American ideological scene. In the fifty-five years that I have been aware of Max's presence, in all of his many permutations and combinations and seeming twists and turns, he has taken the totally repellent position at every step of the way. (Murray Rothbard)
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 Rothbard
Barnes dismissed his own past criticism of the World War II unconditional surrender policy as valid but superficial; for he had learned from General Albert C. Wedemeyer's book that the murder of Germans and Japanese was the overriding aim of World War II – virtually an Anglo-American scalping party.
Murray Rothbard
The problem is that he originated nothing that was true, and that whatever he originated was wrong.
Murray Rothbard
If ‘we are the government,' then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical; it is also ‘voluntary' on the part of the individual concerned... if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is ‘doing it to himself' and therefore nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered, instead, they must have ‘committed suicide,' since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and therefore anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part... the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or less degree.
Murray Rothbard
It is the state that is robbing all classes, rich and poor, black and white alike; it is the state that is ripping us all off; it is the state that is the common enemy of mankind.
Murray Rothbard
To be moral, an act must be free.
Murray Rothbard
Shameless sponging on friends and relatives ... Marx affected a hatred and contempt for the very material resource he was too anxious to cadge and use so recklessly. Marx created an entire philosophy around his own corrupt attitudes toward money.
Murray Rothbard
The cumulative development of a medium of exchange on the free market - is the only way money can become established. ... government is powerless to create money for the economy; it can only be developed by the processes of the free market.
Murray Rothbard
The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.
Murray Rothbard
Money is a commodity ... not a useless token only good for exchanging; ... It differs from other commodities in being demanded mainly as a medium of exchange. (Murray Rothbard)
Inflation may be defined as any increase in the economy's supply of money not consisting of an increase in the stock of the money metal.
Murray Rothbard
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.
Murray Rothbard
The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress.
Murray Rothbard
Falling prices through increased production is a wonderful long-run tendency of untrammeled capitalism.
Murray Rothbard
Never have the world's moneys been so long cut off from their metallic roots.
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
It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.
Murray Rothbard
Early economic theory was rooted in the Italian, French, and Spanish traditions, which were subjectivist oriented. Then it shifted onto the terrible path by Smith and Ricardo and the British classical tradition, which is 'objectivist' - values are in inherent in production.
Murray Rothbard
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
The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it. (Murray Rothbard)
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.
Murray Rothbard
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
A parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i. e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive. (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.) This rule allows us to solve such vexing questions as: should a parent have the right to allow a deformed baby to die (e. g., by not feeding it)? The answer is of course yes, following a fortiori from the larger right to allow any baby, whether deformed or not, to die.
Murray 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 Rothbard