Quote

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.

Murray Rothbard

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Murray Rothbard
Age: 68 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 2
Died: 1995
Died: January 7
Activist
Economist
Essayist
Historian
Philosopher
Professor
University Teacher
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Murray Newton Rothbard
Murray N. Rothbard
Particular
Anarchy
Briefly
State
Services
Rendered
Society
Area
Voluntary
Force
Maintain
Coercion
Use
Contribution
Payment
Given
Areas
Attempts
States
Organization
Revenue
Obtains
Violence
Monopoly
Territorial

More quotes by Murray Rothbard

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Unlike the days of the gold standard, it is impossible for the Federal Reserve to go bankrupt it holds the legal monopoly of counterfeiting (of creating money out of thin air) in the entire country.
Murray Rothbard
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Only the State legally obtains its revenue by coercion.
Murray Rothbard
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The best way to help the poor is to slash taxes and allow savings, investment, and creation of jobs to proceed unhampered.
Murray Rothbard
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It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost.
Murray Rothbard
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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.
Murray Rothbard
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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.
Murray Rothbard
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Scratch an egalitarian, and you will inevitably find a statist.
Murray Rothbard
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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.
Murray Rothbard
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Soaking the rich would not only be profoundly immoral, it would drastically penalize the very virtues: thrift, business foresight, and investment, that have brought about our remarkable standard of living. It would truly be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Murray Rothbard
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The natural tendency of the state is inflation.
Murray Rothbard
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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
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The state has typically been a device for producing affluence for a few at the expense of many.
Murray Rothbard
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In short, the early receivers of the new money in this market chain of events gain at the expense of those who receive the money toward the end of the chain, and still worse losers are the people (e.g., those on fixed incomes such as annuities, interest, or pensions) who never receive the new money.
Murray Rothbard
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The necessary consequence of an egalitarian program is the decidedly inegalitarian creation of a ruthless power elite.
Murray Rothbard
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This, by the way, is the welfare state in action: Its a whole bunch of special interest groups screwing consumers and taxpayers, and making them think they're really benefiting.
Murray Rothbard
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The costs of government are bound to be much higher than those of the free market. . .The State cannot calculate well and therefore cannot gauge its costs accurately.
Murray Rothbard
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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.
Murray Rothbard
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[Professional politicians] don't mind if price controls cause shortages of health care. In fact, they welcome the prospect, because then they can impose rationing they can impose priorities, and tell everyone how much of what kind of medical care they can have. And besides, ... there's that deeply satisfying rush of power.
Murray Rothbard
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The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.
Murray Rothbard
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Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.
Murray Rothbard