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" Keynes was scarcely a 'revolutionary' in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science. "

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" An attempt by the Mongols to introduce paper money in Persia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries flopped because no one would accept it. The public had no confidence in the paper money despite the awesomely coercive decrees that always marked Mongol rule. "

Murray Rothbard

Money

Always

Confidence

" The natural law is, in essence, a profoundly 'radical' ethic, for it holds the existing status quo, which might grossly violate natural law, up to the unsparing and unyielding light of reason. "

" If a man's free will to adopt ideas and values is inalienable, his freedom of action - his freedom to put these ideas into effect in the world - is not in such a fortunate condition. "

" In the United States, after World War II, it took about two decades for the message to slowly seep in that inflation was going to be a permanent fact of the American way of life. "

" There is no need for government to intervene in money and prices because of changing population or for any other reason. The 'problem' of the proper supply of money is not a problem at all. "

" In a sense, the market, by expecting a fall in prices, discounts that fall and makes it happen right away instead of later. Expectations speed up future price reactions. "

" Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the United States and abroad. Therefore, they have a vested interest in promoting deficits and in forcing taxpayers to redeem government debt. "

" It is important to realize that gold and silver are international commodities and that, therefore, when not prohibited by government decree, foreign coins are perfectly capable of serving as standard moneys. "

" Only individuals have ends and can act to attain them. There are no such things as ends of or actions by 'groups,' 'collectives,' or 'States,' which do not take place as actions by various specific individuals. "

" Early economic theory was rooted in the Italian, French, and Spanish traditions, which were subjectivist oriented. Then it shifted onto the terrible path by Smith and Ricardo and the British classical tradition, which is 'objectivist' - values are in inherent in production. "

" Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense. "

" The threat of gold redeemability imposes a constant check and limit on inflationary issues of government paper. If the government can remove the threat, it can expand and inflate without cease. And so it begins to emit propaganda, trying to persuade the public not to use gold coins in their daily lives. "

" Famine emerges from a lack of interlocal trade; when one locality's food crop fails, since there is virtually no trade with other localities, the bulk of the people starve. It is precisely the permeation of the free market throughout the world that has virtually ended this scourge of famine by permitting trade between areas. "

" By the 1890s, the leading Wall Street bankers were becoming increasingly disgruntled with their own creation, the National Banking System... while the banking system was partially centralized under their leadership, it was not centralized enough. "

" The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it. "

" Hoover had prevented 'an immediate attack upon wages as a basis of maintaining profits,' but the result of wiping out profits and maintaining artificial wage rates was chronic, unprecedented depression. "

" The Keynesian prescription for unemployment rests on the persistence of a 'money illusion' among workers, i.e., on the belief that while, through unions and government, they will keep money wage rates from falling, they will also accept a fall in real wage rates via higher prices. "

" In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve the consumers; in government, the fittest are those most adept at wielding coercion and/or those most adroit at making demagogic appeals to the voting public. "

" The majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the 'intellectuals.' "

" Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial government of Massachusetts emitted a fiat paper issue in 1690. "

" Philosophically, I believe that libertarianism - and the wider creed of sound individualism of which libertarianism is a part - must rest on absolutism and deny relativism. "

" While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet. "

" The majority is not society, is not everyone. Majority coercion over the minority is still coercion. "

" As the greatest and last major crisis before 1836, the panic of 1819 holds considerable interest for the study of business cycles and for the present day. It was an economy in transition, as it were, to a state where business cycles as we know them would develop. "

" 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. "

" The Jacksonians were not monetary nationalists; specie was specie, and they saw no reason that foreign gold or silver coins should not circulate with the same full privileges as American-minted coins. "

" Savings and investment are indissolubly linked. It is impossible to encourage one and discourage the other. "

" The politician and the government expert receive their revenues, not from service voluntarily purchased on the market, but from a compulsory levy on the populace. These officials, therefore, wholly lack the pecuniary incentive to care about serving the public properly and competently. "

" If taxes and government spending are both slashed, then the salutary result will be to lower the parasitic burden of government taxes and spending upon the productive activities of the private sector. "

" It is human nature that when you see something work well, you do more of it. If, in its ceaseless quest for revenue, government sees a seemingly harmless method of raising funds without causing much inflation, it will grab on to it. "