A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
Economic freedom is ... an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
Take not from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense... that gold and economic freedom are inseparable.
The world's problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom.
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.
Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
Without economic development, any potential for political openness and freedom will be questionable.
The issuing power [of money] should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.
There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
The power to determine the quantity of money... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
or simply:
