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States have always needed intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable

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
States
Believe
Intellectuals
Good
Believing
Always
Inevitable
Rule
Needed
Wise
Public

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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John Stuart was the quintessence of soft rather than hardcore, a woolly minded man of mush in striking contrast to his steel-edged father.
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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.
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Monetary expansion is a massive scheme of hidden redistribution.
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Since 1933, New Deal farm policy has continued and expanded, pursuing its grisly logic at the expense of the nation's consumers, year in and year out, in Democrat or Republican regimes, in good times and in bad.
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The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.
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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?
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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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If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and . . . try freedom.
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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.
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Gold was not selected arbitrarily by governments to be the monetary standard. Gold had developed for many centuries on the free market as the best money as the commodity providing the most stable and desirable monetary medium.
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All interstate wars intensify aggression – maximize it … some wars are even more unjust than others. In other words, all government wars are unjust, although some governments have less unjust claims.
Murray Rothbard
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The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress.
Murray Rothbard
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I want to make it clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that fiat money, once established on the ruins of gold, cannot then continue indefinitely on its own.
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You don't need a treaty to have free trade.
Murray Rothbard
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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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...The very nature of interstate war puts innocent civilians into great jeopardy, especially with modern technology.
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The more the government intervenes to delay the market's adjustment, the longer and more grueling the depression will be, and the more difficult will be the road to complete recovery.
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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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