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Murray Rothbard [1926-1995] American
Rank: 101
Economist


Murray Newton Rothbard was an American heterodox economist of the Austrian School, a revisionist historian, and a political theorist whose writings and personal influence played a seminal role in the development of modern libertarianism.

Government, Legal, Famous, Independence, Leadership, Society, War



QuoteTagsRank
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.
101
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. Government
102
The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it. War
103
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. Society
104
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.
105
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.
106
Subjectivism is not an absolute principle; it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sound methodology.
107
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.
108
Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the United States and abroad. Therefore, they have a vested interest in promoting deficits and in forcing taxpayers to redeem government debt.
109
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.
110
All government wars are unjust. Government
111
There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.
112
Play, as a consumers' good, is subject to the law of marginal utility, as are all goods, and the time spent in play will be balanced against the utility to be derived from other obtainable goods.
113
Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege.
114
Now judicial review, beloved by conservatives, can, of course, fulfill the excellent function of declaring government interventions and tyrannies unconstitutional. But it can also validate and legitimize the government in the eyes of the people by declaring these actions valid and constitutional.
115
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.
116
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.
117
Ultimately, there is no entity called 'government'; there are only people forming themselves into groups called 'governments' and acting in a 'governmental' manner.
118
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.
119
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.
120
While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient.
121
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.
122
We have gotten to the point where everything the government does is counterproductive; the conclusion, of course, is that the government should do nothing at all, that is, should retire quickly from the monetary and economic scene and allow freedom and free markets to work.
123
Reagonomics - a blend of monetarism and fiscal Keynesianism swathed in classical liberal and supply-side rhetoric - is in no way going to solve the problem of inflationary depression or of the business cycle.
124
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.
125
Declines in specific industries can never ignite a general depression. Shifts in data will cause increases in activity in one field, declines in another.
126
The 'boom-bust' cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business.
201
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.
202
The proper governmental policy in a depression is strict laissez-faire, including stringent budget slashing, and coupled perhaps with positive encouragement for credit contraction.
203
Savings and investment are indissolubly linked. It is impossible to encourage one and discourage the other.
204
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.
205
The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively 'peaceful' the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Legal
206
In order to continue in office, any government (not simply a 'democratic' government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature.
207
The majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the 'intellectuals.'
208
Many and subtle are the ideological weapons that the State has wielded through the centuries. Once excellent weapon has been tradition. The longer that the rule of a State has been able to preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon; for then, the X Dynasty or the Y State has the seeming weight of centuries of tradition behind it.
209
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.
210
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. Independence
211
The State has invariably shown a striking talent for the expansion of its powers beyond any limits that might be imposed upon it.
212
Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the State is profoundly and inherently anticapitalist.
213
Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever.
214
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.
215
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.'
216
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.
217
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.
218
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. Famous
219
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.
220
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.
221
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.
222
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. Legal
223
War has generally had grave and fateful consequences for the American monetary and financial system. We have seen that the Revolutionary War occasioned a mass of depreciated fiat paper, worthless Continentals, a huge public debt, and the beginnings of central banking in the Bank of North America.
224
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.
225
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.
226
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.
301
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.
302
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.'
303
The Jacksonians were not monetary nationalists; specie was specie, and they saw no reason that foreign gold or silver coins should not circulate with the same full privileges as American-minted coins.
304
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.
305
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.
306
In order to institute action, it is not sufficient that the individual man have unachieved ends that he would like to fulfill. He must also expect that certain modes of behavior will enable him to attain his ends. A man may have a desire for sunshine, but if he realizes that he can do nothing to achieve it, he does not act on this desire.
307
All action is an attempt to exchange a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory one.
308
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.
309
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.
310
The majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion.
311
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.
312
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.
313
In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve the consumers; in government, the fittest are those most adept at wielding coercion and/or those most adroit at making demagogic appeals to the voting public.
314
Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments.
315
The natural law is, in essence, a profoundly 'radical' ethic, for it holds the existing status quo, which might grossly violate natural law, up to the unsparing and unyielding light of reason.
316
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.
317
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.
318
The avoidance of explicit ethical judgments leads political scientists to one overriding implicit value judgment - that in favor of the political status quo as it happens to prevail in any given society.
319
Economics has revealed a great truth about the natural law of human interaction: that not only is production essential to man's prosperity and survival, but so also is exchange.
320
'The General Theory' was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.
321
In order to conquer the world of economics with his new theory, it was critical for Keynes to destroy his rivals within Cambridge itself. In his mind, he who controlled Cambridge controlled the world.
322
Where did Keynes stand on overt fascism? From the scattered information now available, it should come as no surprise that Keynes was an enthusiastic advocate of the 'enterprising spirit' of Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder and leader of British fascism, in calling for a comprehensive 'national economic plan' in late 1930.
323
The major reason for Keynes's rejection of communism was simply that he could scarcely identify with the grubby proletariat.
324
Keynes was scarcely a 'revolutionary' in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.
325
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.
326
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.
401
The threat of gold redeemability imposes a constant check and limit on inflationary issues of government paper. If the government can remove the threat, it can expand and inflate without cease. And so it begins to emit propaganda, trying to persuade the public not to use gold coins in their daily lives.
402
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.
403
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.
404
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.
405
It is human nature that when you see something work well, you do more of it. If, in its ceaseless quest for revenue, government sees a seemingly harmless method of raising funds without causing much inflation, it will grab on to it.
406
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.
407
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.
408
Commercial banks - that is, fractional reserve banks - create money out of thin air. Essentially, they do it in the same way as counterfeiters.
409
Fractional reserve banks are sitting ducks and are always subject to contraction. When the banks' state of inherent bankruptcy is discovered, for example, people will tend to cash in their deposits, and the contractionary, deflationary pressure could be severe.
410
One grave and fundamental Keynesian error is to persist in regarding the interest rate as a contract rate on loans instead of the price spreads between stages of production. The former, as we have seen, is only the reflection of the latter.
411
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?
412
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.
413
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. Leadership
414
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.
415
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.
416
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.
417
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.
418
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.
419
Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.
420
Private philanthropy is the direct expression of the great Christian principle of the brotherhood of man and the Golden Rule. Private philanthropy indeed is the only valid expression of these ethical principles; compulsory charity through 'social legislation' is the exact contrary: it is the evil imposition of force by one group on another.
421
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.
422
The very essence of political philosophy is the carving out of an ethical system - strictly, a subset of ethics dealing with political ethics. Ethics is the one rational discipline that demands the establishment of a rational set of value judgments; political ethics is that subset applying to matters of State.
423
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.
424
Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason.
425
Famine emerges from a lack of interlocal trade; when one locality's food crop fails, since there is virtually no trade with other localities, the bulk of the people starve. It is precisely the permeation of the free market throughout the world that has virtually ended this scourge of famine by permitting trade between areas.
426

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