Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.
The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.
The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by governments.
The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy.
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.
Every socialist is a disguised dictator.
My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.
Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.
The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.
Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.
The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.
Louis XIV was very frank and sincere when he said: I am the State. The modern statist is modest. He says: I am the servant of the State; but, he implies, the State is God. You could revolt against a Bourbon king, and the French did it. This was, of course, a struggle of man against man. But you cannot revolt against the god State and against his humble handy man, the bureaucrat.
Liberty is always freedom from the government.
Progress is precisely that which rules and regulations did not foresee.
It is merely a metaphor to call competition competitive war, or simply, war. The function of battle is destruction; of competition, construction.
The continued existence of society depends upon private property.
The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without.
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.
It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.
Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will. It allows other forces to arise side by side with and in opposition to political power. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and ultimately all intellectual and material progress are rooted.
Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.
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