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To those advocates of independent paper moneys who also champion the free market, I would address this simple question: Why don't you advocate the unlimited freedom of each individual to manufacture dollars? If dollars are really and properly things-in-themselves, why not let everyone manufacture them as they manufacture wheat and baby food?

Murray Rothbard

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Murray Rothbard
Age: 68 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 2
Died: 1995
Died: January 7
Activist
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The Bronx
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Murray Newton Rothbard
Murray N. Rothbard
Money
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More quotes by Murray Rothbard

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It is particularly odd that economists who profess to be champions of a free-market economy, should go to such twists and turns to avoid facing the plain fact: that gold, that scarce and valuable market-produced metal, has always been, and will continue to be, by far the best money for human society.
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Monetary expansion is a massive scheme of hidden redistribution.
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All government wars are unjust.
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Having examined the nature of fractional reserve and of central banking, and having seen how the questionable blessings of Central Banking were fastened upon America, it is time to see precisely how the Fed, as presently constituted, carries out its systemic inflation and its control of the American monetary system.
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Behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleas for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves (the elites) at the top of a new hierarchy of power.
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All government operation is wasteful, inefficient, and serves the bureaucrat rather than the consumer.
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Governmental subsidy systems promote inefficiency in production and efficiency in coercion and subservience, while penalizing efficiency in production and inefficiency in predation.
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Throughout history governments have been chronically short of revenue. The reason should be clear: unlike you and me, governments do not produce useful goods and services that they can sell on the market governments, rather than producing and selling services, live parasitically off the market and off society.
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On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers.
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Liberty and morality had to win their way slowly over many centuries, until finally expanding liberty made possible the great technological advance of the Industrial Revolution and the flowering of modern capitalism.
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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.
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Money ... is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, 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.
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I see a great future for gold and silver coins as the currency people may increasingly turn to when paper currencies begin to disintegrate.
Murray Rothbard
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Monetary inflation not only raises prices and destroys the value of the currency unit it also acts as a giant system of expropriation.
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Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.
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Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.
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There can be no truly moral choice unless that choice is made in freedom similarly, there can be no really firmly grounded and consistent defense of freedom unless that defense is rooted in moral principle.
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Unlike every other person and institution in society, government obtains its revenue from coercion, from taxation.
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The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress.
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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