Famous Quotes & Sayings

Murray Rothbard

Government is a gang of thieves writ large.

Murray Rothbard

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

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

What...can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.

Murray Rothbard

While big-business leaders and firms can be highly productive, servants of consumers in a free market economy, they are also all too often, seekers after subsidies, contracts, privileges, or cartels furnished by big government. Often, business lobbyists and leaders are the sparkplugs for the statist, interventionist system.

Murray Rothbard

The natural tendency of government, once in charge of money, is to inflate and to destroy the value of the currency.

Murray Rothbard

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

Governmental subsidy systems promote inefficiency in production and efficiency in coercion and subservience, while penalizing efficiency in production and inefficiency in predation.

Murray Rothbard

All government operation is wasteful, inefficient, and serves the bureaucrat rather than the consumer.

Molly Ivins

During a recent panel on the numerous failures of American journalism, I proposed that almost all stories about government should begin: “Look out! They're about to smack you around again!

Molly Ivins

The government can now delve into personal and private records of individuals even if they cannot be directly connected to a terrorist or foreign government. Bank records, e-mails, library records, even the track of discount cards at grocery stores can be obtained on individuals without establishing any connection to a terrorist before a judge. According to the Los Angeles Times, Al Qaeda uses sophisticated encryption devices freely available on the Internet that cannot be cracked. So the terrorists are safe from cyber-snooping, but we're not.

Molly Ivins

Any nation that can survive what we have lately in the way of government, is on the high road to permanent glory.

Millicent Fenwick

You give bureaucrats power over others, and when the others are poor and helpless, nothing matches government. More than any single exploitive tyrannical force, the possibility of what government can do is absolutely terrifying.

Millicent Fenwick

The business of government is justice.

Millicent Fenwick

There is hardly a facet of life that is now free of some sort of federal action.

Millicent Fenwick

The only people who would be in government are those who care more about people than they do about power.

Millicent Fenwick

We must have government, but we must watch them like a hawk.

Milton Friedman

Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. He's always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that and the other thing.

Milton Friedman

Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.

Milton Friedman

How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God's name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?

Milton Friedman

One of the reasons that I am in favor of less government is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.

Milton Friedman

The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus.

Milton Friedman

Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail. That is what we have done at one time or another to produce surpluses of wheat, of sugar, of butter, of many other commodities. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.

Milton Friedman

Anything that government can do, private enterprise can do for half the cost.

Milton Friedman

Government spends somebody else's money on somebody else.

Milton Friedman

How do you hold down government spending?

Milton Friedman

[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.

Milton Friedman

I am a limited-government libertarian.

Milton Friedman

There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.

Milton Friedman

I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.

Milton Friedman

There's only one thing that all of the central banks control and that is the base, their own liability, and they can control that in various ways. They can control it directly by open market operations, buying and selling government securities or other assets, for example, buying and selling gold, or they can control it indirectly by altering the rate at which banks lend to one another.

Milton Friedman

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

Milton Friedman

If we have system in which government is in a position to give large favor - it's human nature to try to get this favor - whether those people are large enterprises, or whether they're small businesses like farmers, or whether they're representatives of any other special group. The only way to prevent that is to force them to engage in competition one with the other.