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 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.
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 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.
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 interventionists do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are. For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people.
Liberty is always freedom from the government.
If you increase the quantity of money, you bring about the lowering of the purchasing power of the monetary unit.
The main propoganda trick of supporters of the allegedly "progressive" policy of government control is to blame capitalism for all that is unsatisfactory in present-day conditions and to extol the blessings of socialism. They have never attempted to prove their fallacious dogmas, all they did was to call their adversaries names and cast suspicion upon their motives. And, unfortunately, the average citizen cannot see through these stratagems. The liars must be afraid of the truth and are therefore driven to suppress its pronouncement.
The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.
The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.
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.
[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.
The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.
What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.
He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.
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