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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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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
Virtue
Remarkable
Foresight
Rich
Lays
Thrift
Living
Golden
Geese
Business
Investment
Profoundly
Would
Killing
Immoral
Penalize
Brought
Virtues
Drastically
Standards
Eggs
Soaking
Truly
Standard
Goose

More quotes by Murray Rothbard

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The concept of life and perfection is incompatible. BUT so is death and perfection
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I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual.
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Subjectivism is not an absolute principle it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sound methodology.
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We libertarians are not the spokesmen for any ethnic or economic class we are the spokesmen for all classes, for all of the public we strive to see all of these groups united, hand-in-hand, in opposition to the plundering and privileged minority that constitutes the rulers of the State.
Murray Rothbard
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The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for predation on the property of the producers.
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.
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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
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The more these readjustments are delayed ... the longer the depression will have to last, and the longer complete recovery is postponed.
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Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially so among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers... Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker's employment it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him.
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.
Murray Rothbard
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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.
Murray Rothbard
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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.
Murray Rothbard
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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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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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The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.
Murray Rothbard
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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.
Murray Rothbard
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Who wants good people in government? Good people should be in the private sector. Helping us out, helping themselves out in the private sector. We want schmoes in government. We want people who can't find the doorknob. Why waste productive people, as well as looting the taxpayer?
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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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.
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.
Murray Rothbard