Murray Rothbard Quotes

We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely—those against private citizens or those against itself?

All government wars are unjust.

The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.

The ingenious slogan that the public debt does not matter because ‘we owe it to ourselves’ is clearly absurd.

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.

The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for predation on the property of the producers.

Monetary expansion is a massive scheme of hidden redistribution.

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.

It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.

Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences.

You don’t need a treaty to have free trade.

The modern welfare state, highly touted as soaking the rich to subsidize the poor, does no such thing. In fact, soaking the rich would have disastrous effects, not just for the rich but for the poor and middle classes themselves. For it is the rich who provide a proportionately greater amount of saving, investment capital, entrepreneurial foresight, and financing of technological innovation that has brought the Unites States to by far the highest standard of living – for the mass of the people – of any country in history.