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" Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments. "

Murray Rothbard

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" The major reason for Keynes's rejection of communism was simply that he could scarcely identify with the grubby proletariat. "

Murray Rothbard

" 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. "

Murray Rothbard

" The most famous and one of the most thoroughgoing opponents of bank credit was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson reacted to the panic of 1819 as a confirmation of his pessimistic views on banks. "

Murray Rothbard

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

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" 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. "

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" Play, as a consumers' good, is subject to the law of marginal utility, as are all goods, and the time spent in play will be balanced against the utility to be derived from other obtainable goods. "

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" The fact that natural-law theorists derive from the very nature of man a fixed structure of law independent of time and place, or of habit or authority or group norms, makes that law a mighty force for radical change. "

Murray Rothbard

" I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation. "

Murray Rothbard

" 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. "

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" Tied up with his dismissal of natural law is Hayek's continuous, and all-pervasive, attack on reason. Reason is his bete noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even contradictory standpoints, he opposes it. "

Murray Rothbard

" 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. "

Murray Rothbard

" Among intellectuals who consider themselves 'scientific,' the phrase 'the nature of man' is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull. "

Murray Rothbard

" War has generally had grave and fateful consequences for the American monetary and financial system. We have seen that the Revolutionary War occasioned a mass of depreciated fiat paper, worthless Continentals, a huge public debt, and the beginnings of central banking in the Bank of North America. "

Murray Rothbard

" 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. "

Murray Rothbard

" 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. "

Murray Rothbard

" Leading the boom of 1838 were state governments, who, finding themselves with the unexpected windfall of a distributed surplus from the federal government, proceeded to spend the money wildly and borrow even more extravagantly on public works and other uneconomic forms of 'investment.' "

Murray Rothbard

" 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

" Economics has revealed a great truth about the natural law of human interaction: that not only is production essential to man's prosperity and survival, but so also is exchange. "

Murray Rothbard

" Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason. "

Murray Rothbard

" Originally, Congress provided in 1793 that all foreign coins circulating in the United States be legal tender. Indeed, foreign coins have been estimated to form 80 percent of American domestic specie circulation in 1800. "

Murray Rothbard

" In order to continue in office, any government (not simply a 'democratic' government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature. "

Murray Rothbard

" There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian. "

Murray Rothbard

" It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by those receipts. "

Murray Rothbard

" 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. "

Murray Rothbard

" 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. "

Murray Rothbard

" The contemporary political scientist believes that he can avoid the necessity of moral judgments and that he can help frame public policy without committing himself to any ethical position. "

Murray Rothbard

" To deprecate human reason by saying that none of us is or can be omniscient is absurd, for it takes an impossible standard as the judge of a possible and real condition. All of our knowledge we get from the exercise of our reason; to say that no man can be God and know everything is to take an irrational standard of evaluation. "

Murray Rothbard

" We have gotten to the point where everything the government does is counterproductive; the conclusion, of course, is that the government should do nothing at all, that is, should retire quickly from the monetary and economic scene and allow freedom and free markets to work. "

Murray Rothbard

" 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. "

Murray Rothbard

" The expansionary operations of the Second Bank of the United States, coupled with its laxity toward insisting on specie payment by the state banks, impelled a further inflationary expansion of state banks on top of the spectacular enlargement of the central bank. Thus, the number of incorporated state banks rose from 232 in 1816 to 338 in 1818. "

Murray Rothbard