Quotes from Murray N. Rothbard

Dutt effectively concluded with a quote from an editor of the highly respected Current History Magazine: The new America [the editor had written in mid-1933] will not be capitalist in the old sense, nor will it be socialist. If at the moment the trend is towards fascism, it will be an American fascism, embodying the experience, the traditions, and the hopes of a great middle-class nation.13 Thus

In the field of justice, man's will is all; men can move mountains, if only men so decide.

If man acquires rights over things, it is because he is at once active, intelligent and free; by his activity he spreads over external nature; by his intelligence he governs it, and bends it to his use; by his liberty, he establishes between himself and it the relation of cause and effect and makes it his own. ...

In particular, we must examine the firm and growing conviction of the present author not only that libertarianism will triumph eventually and in the long run, but also that it will emerge victorious in a remarkably short period of time. For I am convinced that the dark night of tyranny is ending, and that a new dawn of liberty is now at hand.

I believe that fractional-reserve banking is disastrous both for the morality and for the fundamental bases and institutions of the market economy.

The ultimate libertarian program may be summed up in one phrase: the abolition of the public sector, the conversion of all operations and services performed by the government into activities performed voluntarily by the private-enterprise economy.

If 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. It will also be able to add quietly and effectively to its own wealth and to the wealth of its favorite groups, and without incurring the wrath that taxes often invoke. The state has understood this lesson since the kings of old began repeatedly to debase the coinage.

The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, regulating the railroads, was one of the first federal regulatory acts in American history. The Act began with a bill introduced in the House by Democratic Representative James H. Hopkins of Pittsburgh, in 1876 at the behest of a group of independent oil producers of western Pennsylvania.

Letters circulated without censorship, with a freedom that astonishes the twentieth-century mind.… The subjects of two warring nations talked to each other if they met, and when they could not meet, corresponded, not as enemies but as friends.

He seeks to show that the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to accept State rule, and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded subjects.

The only proper test of worth is the judgment of the consumer who actually uses the product. And the State's judgment is bound to be governed by its own despotic interests.

A government that has a permanent standing army at its disposal will always be tempted to use it, and to use it in an aggressive, interventionist, and warlike manner.

A market boom based entirely on capital gains is merely a form of pyramid selling.

Unemployment will progress beyond the "frictional" stage and become really severe and lasting only if wage rates are kept artificially high and are prevented from falling. If wage rates are kept above the free-market level that clears the demand for and supply of labor, laborers will remain permanently unemployed.

The ICC was therefore in keeping with the law when, to the delight of the railroads, it decided to give its sanction and imprimatur to the freight rates worked out by the railroad rate associations—in short, to use the federal government to ratify rates decided upon by private railroad cartels.

individuals. 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.

a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of "nationalism" has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles

Si los humanos son tan malos, ¿cómo podemos esperar que un gobierno coercitivo, compuesto por humanos, mejore la situación?46 Rothbard responde a estos argumentos y a muchos más.47

si realmente queremos mejorar el mundo, debemos mirar más allá del gobierno. Las soluciones reales no están en el poder, sino en el mercado.

Thus, the well-known theme of "separation of Church and State" was but one of many interrelated motifs that could be summed up as "separation of the economy from the State," "separation of speech and press from the State," "separation of land from the State," "separation of war and military affairs from the State," indeed, the separation of the State from virtually everything

Originally, the prohibitionists had habitually referred to themselves as temperate, as men of temperance. By the 1880s and 1890s, however, this was no longer true: the prohibitionists now spoke of themselves as "radicals." It was no longer enough to attack hard liquor; denunciations of beer were now stepped up.

For States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that the "emperor has clothes.

For empirically, taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States. Such a statement is bound to shock Americans, subject as we have been for decades to intense propaganda by the Establishment on the invariable saintliness, peaceful intentions, and devotion to justice of the American government in foreign affairs.

Albert Jay Nock wrote vividly that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime. . . . It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.