Rothbard A to Z

SAMUELSON, PAUL

Paul Samuelson has written of the joy of being under 30 when The General Theory was published in 1936, exulting, with Wordsworth, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”

Keynes, the Man, p. 39

… the high panjandrum of Orthodox Keynesian economics …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 211

SAVINGS

Savings results in capital accumulation …

Classical Economics, p. 51

… the proximate demand for labor is supplied by savings, even though the ultimate demand may be supplied by consumers.… savings pays for the factors ahead of production and sale … the consumers are last down the line of production. Furthermore, savings builds up a capital structure and increases funds paid to wages and other factors, which cannot get paid unless savings are first taken out of income previously supplied to producers by consumers.

Classical Economics, p. 285

… Savings do not “leak out” of the economy; they are spent, on vitally important investments in resources and capital goods.

Classical Economics, p. 430

All saving is directed toward enjoying more consumption in the future. Potential present consumption is foregone in return for an expected increase in future consumption.

Economic Controversies, p. 523

… saving is spent on investment goods, and the key to harmony and equilibrium is price—lower spending can always be equilibrated easily on the market by a fall in prices.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 376

… it is the thrifty and the industrious who provide prosperity …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 422

The restriction of consumption is called saving …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 48

Saving involves the restriction of consumption compared to the amount that could be consumed; it does not always involve an actual reduction in the amount consumed over the previous level of consumption.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 53

… independent acts of saving are necessary for replacement of goods …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 55n33

Any actor will continue to save and invest his resources in various expected future consumers’ goods as long as the utility, considered in the present, of the marginal product of each unit saved and invested is greater than the utility of present consumers’ goods which he could obtain by not performing that saving. …

… any given saving will be invested either in maintaining the present capital structure or in adding to it capital in more and more remote stages of production, i.e., in longer processes of production. Thus, any new saving (beyond maintaining the structure) will tend to lengthen production processes and invest in higher and higher orders of capital goods.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 57

… restriction of present consumption is saving …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 345

… the disutilities of labor and of waiting—as expressed in the time-preference ratios—determine how much of people’s energies and how much of their savings will go into the production process.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 360

Each individual, on the basis of his time-preference schedule, decides between the amount of his money income to be devoted to saving and the amount to be devoted to consumption.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 400

Net saving … increases gross investment in the economy.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 527

The greater the shift from saving to consumption … the greater the lowering of productivity and living standards.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 534

… only increased saving can make more capital available … the supply of capital goods is limited by the savings available, and there is almost always a sheaf of technological opportunities awaiting more capital …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 719

All saving is directed toward enjoying more consumption in the future; otherwise, there would be no point at all to saving. Saving is abstaining from possible present consumption in return for the expectation of increased consumption at some time in the future. No one wants capital goods for their own sake. They are only the embodiment of increased consumption in the future.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 918

… the market’s voluntary consumption/investment allocations are optimal … any government interference in this proportion, from either direction, is distortive of that market and of production to meet the wants of the consumers. There is nothing, after all, particularly sacred about savings; they are simply the road to future consumption.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 919

… in cases of coerced saving the saver reaps none of the benefit of his sacrifice, which is instead reaped by government officials or other beneficiaries. This contrasts to the free market, where people save and invest precisely because they will reap some tangible and desired rewards.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 965

… those save who voluntarily choose investment over some present consumption. No one is required to sacrifice present consumption who does not wish to do so.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 966

… compulsory saving, with its imposed losses and restrictions on people’s effective choices, cannot spur economic growth …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 969

… an increase in saving resulting from a fall in time preferences leads to a fall in the interest rate and another stable equilibrium situation with a longer and narrower production structure.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 995

SAY, JEAN-BAPTISTE

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), was really in the Cantillon-Turgot tradition rather than that of Smith even though he greatly neglected the former and proclaimed that economics began with Adam Smith.

Classical Economics, p. 3

… Say called himself a Smith follower, but he was one largely in name only … his views were really post-Cantillon and pre-Austrian rather than Smithian classical.

Classical Economics, p. 11

Say … was the first economist to think deeply about the proper methodology of his discipline, and to base his work, as far as he could, upon that methodology. From previous economists and from his own study, he arrived at the unique method of economic theory, what Ludwig von Mises was, over a century later, to call “praxeology.”

Classical Economics, p. 12

J.B. Say firmly reestablished the scholastic-continental-French utility analysis. It is utility and utility alone that gives rise to exchange value … Say adopted a subjective value theory …

Classical Economics, p. 18

… Say went up to the edge of discovering the marginal utility concept without ever quite doing so.

Classical Economics, p. 19

J.B. Say also put clearly for the first time the insight that wants are unlimited.

Classical Economics, p. 21

Say also anticipated the Austrian concept of “stages of production.”

Classical Economics, p. 24

Say was also insistent that interest on the loan market is determined by the demand for capital (to which it is directly proportional) and the supply of capital (inversely proportional).

Classical Economics, p. 25

For Say, the entrepreneur [is] the lynchpin of the economy …

Classical Economics, p. 25

Say was a hard-money man …

Classical Economics, p. 38

On the whole, Say comes out for 100 percent specie money, for a money where paper is only a “certificate” backed fully by gold or silver …

… Say writes highly favorably of the 100 percent reserve banks …

Classical Economics, pp. 39–40

… an implacable hostility to taxation pervades [Say’s] work; he tended to make it responsible for all the economic evils of society …

Classical Economics, p. 40

… we see J.B. Say treating taxation as very close to sheer robbery.

Classical Economics, p. 41

… Say sees the uniqueness of government as the exercise of force and coercion, particularly in the way it extracts its revenue.

Classical Economics, p. 41

… one of the first methodologists in economics …

Economic Controversies, p. 63

In contrast to almost all other economists, J.B. Say was astonishingly clear-sighted about the true nature of the State and of taxation. In Say there was no vain, mystical quest for a truly voluntary State or for a benign quasi-business firm supplying services to the grateful public. Say saw clearly that government supplies services to itself and its favorites, that all government spending is therefore consumption spending by the politicians and the bureaucracy, and that that spending is extracted by coercion at the expense of the taxpaying public.

Economic Controversies, p. 485

Jean-Baptiste Say … contributed considerably more to economics than Say’s Law.

Economic Controversies, p. 530

Taxation, Say clearly pointed out, cripples rather than stimulates production, for taxation robs people of resources that they would rather use in a different way …

Economic Controversies, p. 487

… one of my favorite economists …

Economic Controversies, p. 545

SAY’S LAW

Short of the Garden of Eden, there is no such thing as general “overproduction.” As long as any “economic” desires remain unsatisfied, so long will production be needed and demanded.

America’s Great Depression, p. 56

Say’s Law is simple and almost truistic and self-evident, and it is hard to escape the conviction that it has stirred up a series of storms only because of its obvious political implications and consequences. Essentially Say’s Law is a stern and proper response to the various economic ignoramuses as well as self-seekers who, in every economic recession or crisis, begin to complain loudly about the terrible problem of general “overproduction” or, in the common language of Say’s day, a “general glut” of goods on the market. “Overproduction” means production in excess of consumption: that is, production is too great in general compared to consumption, and hence products cannot be sold in the market.

Classical Economics, p. 27

Since, apart from the Garden of Eden, production always falls short of man’s wants, this means that there is no need to worry about any lack of consumption. The problem that limits wealth and living standards is a deficiency of production. On the market, Say points out, producers exchange their products for money and they use the money to buy the products of others. That is the essence of the exchange, or market, economy. Therefore the supply of one good constitutes, at bottom, the demand for other goods. Consumption demand is simply the embodiment of the supply of other products, whose owners are seeking to purchase the products in question. …

… there can be no general overproduction short of the Garden of Eden.

Classical Economics, p. 28

… if any unsold surplus of one or more goods exists, this price should fall, thereby stimulating demand so that the full amount will be purchased. There can never be any problem of “overproduction” or “underconsumption” on the free market because prices can always fall until the markets are cleared.… Those who complain about overproduction or underconsumption rarely talk in terms of price, yet these concepts are virtually meaningless if the price system is not always held in mind. The question should always be: production or sales at what price? Demand or consumption at what price? There is never any genuine unsold surplus, or “glut,” whether specific or general over the whole economy, if prices are free to fall to clear the market and eliminate the surplus. …

The policy implications of attending to the price system are crucial. It means that to cure a glut, whether specific or pervasive, the remedy is not for the government to spend or create money; it is to allow prices to fall so that the market will be cleared.

… a lower price of any product can always clear the market.

Classical Economics, p. 29

Rather than injuring consumption, saving is invested and thereby increases future consumer spending.

Classical Economics, p. 31

The problem is not general overproduction, but an overproduction of some goods and underproduction of others.

Classical Economics, p. 35

Keynes made a denunciation of Say’s Law the centerpiece of his system. In stating it, Keynes badly vulgarized and distorted the law, leaving out the central role of price adjustments …

Classical Economics, p. 37

… Say’s Law meant that there would be no “gluts” from overproduction or excess capital …

Classical Economics, p. 287

In [Keynes’s] grossly distorted summary of Say’s Law (“supply creates its own demand”), he sets up a straw man and proceeds to demolish it with ease. …

This erroneous and misleading restatement of Say’s Law was subsequently repeated … A better formulation of the Law is that the supply of one good constitutes demand for one or more other goods …

Keynes, the Man, p. 43

SCARCITY

… the wants of man are unlimited, and will continue to be until we achieve genuine general superabundance—a world marked by the prices of all goods and services falling to zero. But at that point there would be no problem of finding consumer demand, or, indeed, any economic problem at all. There would be no need to produce, to work, or to worry about accumulating capital, and we would all be in the Garden of Eden.

Classical Economics, pp. 27–28

… the fact that people act to achieve their goals implies that there is a scarcity of means to attain them; otherwise the goals would already have been attained.

Economic Controversies, p. 33n2

One of the most important features of our economic resources is their scarcity: land, labor, and capital goods factors are all scarce, and may all be put to various possible uses. The free market uses them “productively” because the producers are guided, on the market, to produce what the consumers most need …

Economic Controversies, p. 420

One of the most important features of our economic resources is their scarcity; land, labor, and capital good factors are all scarce, and may all be put to varied possible uses. The free market uses them “productively” because the producers are guided, on the market, to produce what the consumers most need …

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 135

… while our condition of scarcity is clearly superior to that of the caveman, we are still living in a world of pervasive economic scarcity. How will we know when the world has achieved “post-scarcity”? Simply, we will know when all the goods and services that we may want have become so superabundant that their prices have fallen to zero, in short, when we can acquire all goods and services as in a Garden of Eden—without effort, without work, without using any scarce resources.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, pp. 202–03

All resources, all goods are “limited”: that is why they are owned in the first place, and that is why they command a price on the market. If a good were unlimited—as, say, clean air in the days before pollution—there would be no question of owning it or pricing it, since the good would be superabundant in relation to human desires. It is precisely goods that are limited in supply that must be owned by someone—whether by private persons or government—and thereby allocated to their most productive uses through the price system.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 76

… all goods and services are scarce, and the progress of the economy consists in rendering them relatively less scarce, so that their prices decline.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 765

… we do not live in the Garden of Eden … there is a scarcity of resources available to us to achieve all our desired goals.

Making Economic Sense, p. 212

All means are scarce, i.e., limited with respect to the ends that they could possibly serve. If the means are in unlimited abundance, then they need not serve as the object of attention of any human action. For example, air in most situations is in unlimited abundance. It is therefore not a means and is not employed as a means to the fulfillment of ends. …

… scarce means must be allocated by the actor to serve certain ends and leave other ends unsatisfied.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 5

… the omnipresent fact of the scarcity of consumers’ goods must be reflected back in the sphere of the factors of production. The scarcity of consumers’ goods must imply a scarcity of their factors. If the factors were unlimited, then the consumers’ goods would also be unlimited.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 12

… the very fact of the necessity of producing consumers’ goods implies a scarcity of factors of production. If factors of production at each stage were not scarce, then there would be unlimited quantities available of factors of the next lower stage.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 34

… scarce means have to be applied to alternate ends …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 977

Resources in society are limited, and they may be used for countless alternative ends.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1134

… scarce resources are always being allocated …

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 21

… the whole point of economics rests on an analysis of scarcity: the fact that means are scarce (and always will be), in relation to human ends.

Strictly Confidential, p. 269

SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH

Schumpeter’s cycle theory has led many economists to stress the importance of technological innovation … The fallacy involved here is neglect of the fact that technology, while vitally important, is only indirectly, and not directly, involved in an investment.

America’s Great Depression, p. 70

Joseph Schumpeter’s cycle theory is notable for being the only doctrine, apart from the Austrian, to be grounded on, and integrated with, general economic theory. Unfortunately, it was grounded on Walrasian, rather than Austrian, general economics, and was thus doomed from the start.

America’s Great Depression, pp. 72–73

Schumpeter’s view of entrepreneurship—usually acclaimed as his greatest contribution—is extremely narrow and one-sided. He sees entrepreneurship as solely the making of innovations, setting up new firms to innovate, etc. Actually, entrepreneurs are continually at work, always adjusting to uncertain future demand and supply conditions, including the effects of innovations.

America’s Great Depression, p. 74

As a Walrasian, Schumpeter believed that general equilibrium is an overriding reality; and yet, since change, entrepreneurship, profits, and losses clearly exist in the real world, Schumpeter set himself the problem of integrating a theoretical explanation of such change into the Walrasian system. It was a formidable problem indeed, since Schumpeter, unlike the Austrians, could not dismiss general equilibrium as a long-run tendency that is never reached in the real world. For Schumpeter, general equilibrium had to be the overriding reality: the realistic starting point as well as the end point of his attempt to explain economic change.

Economic Controversies, p. 262

… Schumpeter rejected the concept of time-preference … so he concluded that in a state of general equilibrium, the rate of interest as well as profits and losses are all zero.

Economic Controversies, p. 263

In most conceptions of final equilibrium, net savings are zero, but interest is high enough to induce gross saving by capitalists to just replace capital equipment. But in Schumpeter’s equilibriums interest is zero, and this means that gross saving is zero as well. There appear to be neither an incentive for capitalists to maintain their capital equipment in Schumpeterian equilibrium nor the means for them to do so. The Schumpeterian equilibrium is therefore internally inconsistent and cannot be maintained.

Economic Controversies, p. 267

… for Schumpeter, there is no time-preference, and no savings in equilibrium. Consumer tastes are therefore irrelevant to increasing investment, and besides there are no savings or interest income out of which such investment can take place. A change in tastes or time-preferences cannot be an engine for economic change, and neither can investment in change emerge out of savings, profit, or interest.

Economic Controversies, p. 268

With tastes and resources disposed of, there is only one logically possible instrument of change or development left in Schumpeter’s equilibrium system: technique. “Innovation” (a change in embodied technical knowledge or production functions) is for Schumpeter the only logically possible avenue of economic development.… [Innovation] is logically the only way that he can escape from the Walrasian (or neo-Walrasian) box of his own making; it is the only way for any economic change to take place in his system.

But if innovation is the only way out of the Schumpeterian box, how is this innovation to be financed? For there are no savings, no profits, and no interest returns in Schumpeterian equilibrium. Schumpeter is stuck: for there is no way within his own system for innovation to be financed, and therefore for the economy to get out of his own particularly restrictive variant of the Walrasian box. Hence, Schumpeter has to invent a deus ex machina, an exogenous variable from outside his system that will lift the economy out of the box and serve as the only possible engine of economic change. And that deus ex machina is inflationary bank credit. Banks must be postulated that expand the money supply through fractional reserve credit …

Economic Controversies, p. 269

… Schumpeter’s doctrine only seems like a challenging business cycle theory worthy of profound investigation. For it is not really a cycle theory at all. It is simply the only logical way that Schumpeter can break out and then return to the Walrasian box. As such, it is certainly an ingenious formulation, but it has no genuine connection with reality at all.

Economic Controversies, p. 271

… Schumpeter’s constrained model can only work if innovations come in clusters, and the empirical evidence for such clusters is virtually nil. In the real world, innovations occur all the time.

Economic Controversies, p. 272

… Schumpeter saw that one of the problems in applying his model to reality was that if the length of the boom period is determined by the length of time required to “complete” the innovation and bring it to market, then how could his model apply to real life, where simultaneous innovations occur, each of which requires a different time for its completion? His later three-cycle theory is a desperate attempt to encompass such real-life problems. Specifically, Schumpeter has now postulated that the economy, instead of unitarily breaking out and returning to equilibrium, consists of three separate hermetically sealed, strictly periodic cycles—the “Kitchin,” the “Juglar,” and the “Kondratieff”—each with the same innovation-inflation-depression characteristics. This conjuring up of allegedly separate underlying cycles, each cut off from the other, but all adding to each other to yield the observable results of the real world, can only be considered a desperate lapse into mysticism in order to shore up his original model.

Economic Controversies, pp. 272–73

Being a Walrasian, Schumpeter had to believe that general equilibrium is a living reality, an existing state of affairs, at least part of the time. But if the world is in general equilibrium, how do business cycles or growth and development emerge?

Economic Controversies, p. 286

… Schumpeter had trapped himself in a Walrasian box: the only conceivable way by which new investment, which had to be in innovations, could be financed was by the creation of new money. This meant that only inflationary bank credit could finance economic development.

Economic Controversies, p. 287

Schumpeter’s business cycle theory and his theory of growth are, for all their suggestiveness, not positive theories of the real world at all; they are simply ways by which slavish adherence to Walrasian categories boxed Schumpeter in and forced him into his conclusions. In a sense, this was theory by default.

Economic Controversies, p. 288

… was an ardent Walrasian.

Economic Controversies, p. 832

Joseph Schumpeter [was] personally anti-socialist … [but argued] there is no economic calculation problem under socialism.

Economic Controversies, p. 838

… [Schumpeter was a] great economist …

Ethics of Liberty, p. 163

The great economist Joseph Schumpeter [was] … by no means a libertarian.

For a New Liberty, p. 62

The late Professor Joseph Schumpeter pioneered a theory of interest which holds that the rate of interest will be zero in the evenly rotating economy.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 450

Schumpeter … attempted to explain the business cycle by postulating three superimposed cycles.… Each of these cycles is supposed to be roughly periodic in length. They are alleged by Schumpeter to be the three-year “Kitchin” cycle; the nine-year “Juglar”; and the very long (50-year) “Kondratieff.” These cycles are conceived as independent entities, combining in various ways to yield the aggregate cyclical pattern. Any such “multicyclic” approach must be set down as a mystical adoption of the fallacy of conceptual realism. There is no reality or meaning to the allegedly independent sets of “cycles.” The market is one interdependent unit, and the more developed it is, the greater the interrelations among market elements. It is therefore impossible for several or numerous independent cycles to coexist as self-contained units. It is precisely the characteristic of a business cycle that it permeates all market activities.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 855

… Schumpeter’s own theory relies specifically for the financing of innovations on newly expanded bank credit, on new money issued by the banks … it is clear that Schumpeter assumes a hampered market, for we have seen that there could not be any monetary credit expansion on a free market. Schumpeter therefore cannot establish a business-cycle theory for a purely unhampered market.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 857

… Schumpeter’s praiseworthy attempt to derive a business cycle theory from general economic analysis is a failure.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 859

Schumpeter, insofar as he had definite political views, was pro-capitalist and conservative, aristocratic and skeptical. Far from being a top Keynesian, Fabian, et al., Schumpeter was a distinguished anti-Keynesian, and, for all his eccentricities, a truly distinguished economist.

Strictly Confidential, p. 211

The great economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote … that socialism is inevitable, that capitalism is doomed not by its failures but by its very successes, which had given rise to a group of envious and malevolent intellectuals who would subvert and destroy capitalism from within.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 255

SCIENCE

… science is always searching for a unified “single cause” explanation of complex phenomena …

America’s Great Depression, p. xxxvii

… “scientists” are supposed to be objective, disinterested, unbiased in their scientific work.

Classical Economics, p. 56

… the very goal of science is simpler explanations of wider phenomena.

Economic Controversies, p. 9

… science itself must not make value judgments, but confine itself to judgments of fact, since ultimate ends can be only sheer personal preference not subject to rational argument.

Economic Controversies, p. 20

In the present more secular age, the divine right of the State has been supplemented by the invocation of a new god, Science. State rule is now proclaimed as being ultrascientific, as constituting planning by experts.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 69

To carve out an architectonic, a system which enables one to hold a consistent and integrated view of all the disciplines of man is a great and noble aim, and a rationalist individualist philosophy can also accomplish this goal. Clearly, it is the goal of science to be able to explain more and more phenomena.

Left and Right, p. 455

… if there are to be more scientists, or more scientific research, then there must be less people and less resources available for producing all the other goods and services of the economy. The crucial question, then, is: how much? How many people and how much capital are to be funneled into each of the various occupations, including science and technology?

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 16

Private research and development, contracted for with government funds, is a far better policy, from any angle, than direct government research.

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 22

… Federal aid to scientific education, for example, is an improper and unsuccessful method of relieving a shortage of scientists.… The ultimate result of Federal subsidies to science study can only be to aggravate the scientist shortage rather than alleviate it …

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 27

No particular Federal intervention can do anything more to increase the needed supply of scientists.

Science, Technology, and Government, pp. 28–29

… the proper role of government is to confine itself to removing the shackles that it has imposed on the supply and training of scientists.

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 41

There is an inevitable clash between practical administrators of research and the scientists themselves, and the evils of bureaucratic administration and crippling of scientific endeavor will be infinitely greater if science is under the control or direction of the Ultimate Bureaucracy of government.

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 57

“Planned” science sounds impressive; actually it means prohibited science, where no scientist can follow the leads of his own creative ideas.

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 71

Government control of science, government planning of science, is bound to result in the politicization of science …

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 72

… general scientific research should be left to the free market …

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 77

The Federal government could properly stimulate space exploration, in a manner consistent with the free market, by permitting any private firms or organizations that might land on other planets, to own the land and other resources which they begin to exploit: in the manner of the Homestead law, although without the law’s restrictions on acreage or use of land. Automatic government ownership of any new lands in space acts as an enormous damper on private exploration and development.

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 93

Science is an inherently international and cosmopolitan development, and this cannot be thwarted by censorship and the bayonet.

Strictly Confidential, p. 60

SECESSION

… just as the right of nullification for a state logically implies its right of secession, so a right of individual nullification would imply the right of any individual to “secede” from the State under which he lives.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 79

Only by boldly asserting the right of secession can the concept of national self-determination be anything more than a sham and a hoax.

… The whole point of national self-determination is to get top-down coercive power out of the picture and, for the use of force to devolve from the larger entity to more genuine natural and voluntary national entities. In short, to devolve power from the top downward. Imposing national self-determination from the outside makes matters worse and more coercive than ever.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 231

National self-determination must remain a moral principle and a beacon-light for all nations, and not be something to be imposed by outside governmental coercion.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 232

Secession is a crucial part of the libertarian philosophy: that every state be allowed to secede from the nation, every sub-state from the state, every neighborhood from the city, and, logically, every individual or group from the neighborhood.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 17

… if each person may secede from government, we have virtually arrived at the purely free society, where defense is supplied along with all other services by the free market and where the invasive State has ceased to exist.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1051

SECURITY

… every good or service in the world, “collective” ones included, are provided, not in lump sum, but in marginal units. Yet strangely, economists, trained to think of marginal units everywhere else, suddenly start referring to defense as a “lump” when discussing government. In reality, however, there is a vast range of “defense” services that the government (or any other defense agency) could supply to its customers.

Economic Controversies, p. 466

… the State is far more interested in preserving its own power than in defending the rights of private citizens.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 132

… contrary to the limited government theory “protection” is no more a collective, one-lump “thing” than any other good or service in society … “protection” could conceivably imply anything from one policeman for an entire country, to supplying an armed bodyguard and a tank for every citizen …

Ethics of Liberty, pp. 180–81

… the State is not, and can never be, justified as a defender of liberty. For the State lives by its very existence on the twofold and pervasive employment of aggressive violence against the very liberty and property of individuals that it is supposed to be defending. The State is qualitatively unjustified and unjustifiable.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 226

If liberty is established instantaneously throughout the world, then there will of course be no problem of “national defense.” All problems will be local police problems.

For a New Liberty, p. 297

… private, voluntary defense efforts would be far more efficient than government boondoggles. Certainly these efforts would be infinitely more moral.

For a New Liberty, p. 297

… the market provides, not merely voluntary relations, but legitimate services of all types, including the service of coercive (but legitimate) defense of person and property from violent assault.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 320

… each individual should have the right to subscribe to any police or other defense service he wishes to protect his own property …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 340

I consider it immoral and criminal to force someone else to pay for my own defense. Period.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 380

The State, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-State institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the State. To be opposed to the State is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the State does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 535

In the wide sense, defense service consists of guards or police who use force in defending person and property against attack, and judges or courts whose role is to use socially accepted procedures to determine who the criminals or tortfeasors are, as well as to enforce judicial awards, such as damages or the keeping of contracts. On the free market, many scenarios are possible on the relationship between the private courts and the police; they may be “vertically integrated,” for example, or their services may be supplied by separate firms. Furthermore, it seems likely that police service will be supplied by insurance companies who will provide crime insurance to their clients. In that case, insurance companies will pay off the victims of crime or the breaking of contracts or arbitration awards, and then pursue the aggressors in court to recoup their losses. There is a natural market connection between insurance companies and defense service, since they need pay out less benefits in proportion as they are able to keep down the rate of crime.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 538

It is the State, indeed, that functions as a mighty “protection racket” on a giant and massive scale. It is the State that says: “Pay us for your ‘protection’ or else.” In the light of the massive and inherent activities of the State, the danger of a “protection racket” emerging from one or more private police agencies is relatively small indeed.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 539

Collective security means that any border skirmish anywhere, any territorial rectification, any troubles of any pipsqueak country, necessarily provides the sparkplug for a general holocaust, for a world war “against aggression.” … if we are to avoid nuclear holocaust, if we are to prevent World War III, we must bury the doctrine of collective security once and for all …

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 924

… what the enforcing agency combats in a free society is invasion of the physical person and property, not injury to the values of property. For physical property is what the person owns; he does not have any ownership in monetary values, which are a function of what others will pay for his property.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 183

On the free market, defense against violence would be a service like any other, obtainable from freely competitive private organizations.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1056

One of the most common ethical charges leveled at the free market is that it fails to provide “security.” It is said that the blessings of freedom must be weighed against the competing blessings of security—to be provided, of course, by the State.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1313

The State cannot provide absolute security. …

… It can make some secure only at the expense of others. If A can be made more secure only by robbing B, B is made more insecure in the process. Hence, the State, even if production is not drastically reduced, cannot provide security for all, but only for some at the expense of others.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1314

The State itself constantly invades individual liberty and security.

… Freedom and security against aggression are two sides of the same coin.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1315

The “security” of the caste system is the security of the prison house.… This “security” means an all-pervasive hopelessness in a caste society. The son of a baker must always be a baker, even if his interests and abilities are completely elsewhere. No one can rise; no one can shift his occupation or do anything differently from his ancestors. This is the annihilation of all that is most vital, most purposeful, most alive, in the life of any individual.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 126

SELF DEFENSE

… there need be no dichotomy between liberty and property, between defense of the rights of property in one’s person and in one’s material possessions. Defense of rights is logically unitary in all spheres of action.

Conceived in Liberty v. 3, p. 351; p. 1115

Anyone has the right to defend his property against an overt act initiated against it. He may not move with force against an alleged aggressor—a trespasser against his land or chattels—until the latter initiates force by an overt act.

… Any personal attack might turn out to be a murderous one; the victim has no way of knowing whether or not the aggressor is going to stop short of inflicting a grave injury upon him. The victim should be entitled to proceed on the assumption that any attack is implicitly a deadly one, and therefore to use deadly force in return.

Economic Controversies, p. 381

The victim should be entitled to use any force, including deadly force, to defend or to recover his property so long as the crime is in the process of commission—that is, until the criminal is apprehended and duly tried by legal process. In other words, he should be able to shoot looters. …

… no one may use force to defend himself or his property until the initiation of an overt act of aggression against him.

Economic Controversies, p. 382

If every man has the absolute right to his justly-held property it then follows that he has the right to keep that property—to defend it by violence against violent invasion. …

Furthermore, if every man has the right to defend his person and property against attack, then he must also have the right to hire or accept the aid of other people to do such defending: he may employ or accept defenders just as he may employ or accept the volunteer services of gardeners on his lawn.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 77

How extensive is a man’s right of self-defense of person and property? The basic answer must be: up to the point at which he begins to infringe on the property rights of someone else. For, in that case, his “defense” would in itself constitute a criminal invasion of the just property of some other man, which the latter could properly defend himself against.

It follows that defensive violence may only be used against an actual or directly threatened invasion of a person’s property—and may not be used against any non-violent “harm” that may befall a person’s income or property value. …

Defensive violence, therefore, must be confined to resisting invasive acts against person or property.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 77

… the burden of proof that the aggression has really begun must be on the person who employs the defensive violence.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 78

If, as libertarians believe, every individual has the right to own his person and property, it then follows that he has the right to employ violence to defend himself against the violence of criminal aggressors.

For a New Liberty, p. 140

SELF-INTEREST

Collective or social harmony … arises from the efforts of innumerable individuals to advance their self-interest and their happiness. If the government removed all artificial restrictions upon trade, all participants would have incentive to produce and exchange, and self-interest would then be free to do its constructive work. Only the use of coercion or state privilege pits one self-interest against another, whereas submission to the wise natural order would ensure harmony between individual greed and universal benefit.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 270

… pursuit of self-interest on the market leads to advancing the interest of all.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 465

… each man, in pursuing his own self-interest, furthers the interest of everyone else …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 876

… the laissez-faire or free-market doctrine does not assume that everyone always knows his own interest best; it asserts rather that everyone should have the right to be free to pursue his own interest as he deems best.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1300

Other psychic factors being equal, it is to everyone’s self-interest to maximize his monetary income on the market. …

… we can only applaud maximization of monetary income … For market earnings are a social index of one’s services to others … The greater a man’s income, the greater has been his service to others.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1322

SEX

… it is peculiar that while liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar expressions of liberty in action.

Economic Controversies, p. 673

… the attack on women as “sex objects” is simply an attack on sex, period, or rather, on hetero-sex. These new monsters of the female gender are out to destroy the lovely and age-old custom—delighted in by normal women the world over—of women dressing to attract men and succeeding at this pleasant task. What a dull and dreary world these termagants would impose upon us!

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 170

Woman as “sex objects”? Of course they are sex objects and, praise the Lord, they always will be. (Just as men, of course, are sex objects to women.) … When deeper relationships are established between men and women, they each become more than sex objects to each other; they each hopefully become love objects as well.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 171

… if the government presumes to outlaw pornography, it itself becomes the genuine outlaw—for it is invading the property rights of people to produce, sell, buy, or possess pornographic material.… Whether pornography is good, bad, or indifference should be of no interest to the legal authorities.

… prohibition of pornography is an invasion of property right, of the right to produce, sell, buy, and own.

For a New Liberty, pp. 127–28

… the libertarian is precisely interested in legalizing all interrelations whatever between “consenting adults.”

For a New Liberty, p. 129

If labor and persons in general are to be free, then so should there be freedom for prostitution. Prostitution is a voluntary sale of a labor service, and the government has no right to prohibit or restrict such sales.… It should be clear that advocacy of freedom for prostitution does not, for the libertarian, in the least imply advocacy of prostitution itself.

For a New Liberty, pp. 130–31

If sex should be free, then birth control should, of course, be free as well.

For a New Liberty, p. 131

… the wish to preserve a treasured rise in living standards will induce a voluntary reduction of births by the families themselves.

For a New Liberty, p. 131

If the State should not repress voluntary sexual activity, neither should it discriminate for or against either sex.

For a New Liberty, p. 132

Pro-choice paleos should therefore hope that Roe v. Wade is someday overthrown, and abortion questions go back to the state and local levels—the more decentralized the better.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 30

To put it bluntly; I am firmly pro-choice …

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 304

Very simply; there ain’t no such crime as “sexual harassment.” Physical assault or rape has been considered a crime from time immemorial, and it still is. There is no need for some extra “crime” called s.h.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 361

Since most women now enter the workplace, the idea of outlawing flirting is not only totalitarian; it is also absurd. …

… With much of the female population working, dates, marriage, even sex is going to be inevitable.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 362

It is true, very true, that rape is coercion, and that rape is a crime, regardless of the sexual or virtuous status of the victim, that is, whether she is a nun, a monogamous wife and mother, a swinging single, or a hooker.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 369

… every person and therefore every woman has the absolute right to govern and control her own body (or, as we might put it, everyone has the fundamental property right in his own body, or the “right of self-ownership”). This fundamental property right immediately rules out slavery, and the draft. And it also rules out any and all laws restricting any woman’s right to perform an abortion.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 124

The public has just as much of a right to see or purchase portrayals of violence as of sex, free of invasive interference by governmental censors.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 275

… Every woman has the absolute right to her own body. Outlawing abortion is a coercive invasion of that right; it is enslavement of women and compulsory baby-making.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 637

… part of the necessary process of growing up is learning how to curb one’s aggressive impulses, to learn self-control (to use an Old Culture word.) He who can’t or won’t practice such self-control and becomes a criminal aggressor or rapist deserves to be socked with the full majesty of the law. [The] implication that women should go back to the veil and the hoopskirt in order to make life easier for young proto-rapists simply won’t wash. Why should everyone else’s life be made gray and miserable for the sake of coddling proto-rapists? Self-control is their responsibility, not that of females who should be able to dress and act as sexily as they please …

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 771

… It is axiomatic for the libertarian that every individual has the absolute right to own, to control, his or her own body. But, in that case, a woman has the right to eject any unwanted entity from within her own body, whether that entity be a fetus or a nonhuman parasite. Hence, a woman has the absolute right to commit an abortion, or, therefore, the right to hire someone to perform the abortion on her behalf.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 774

If, indeed, abortion is “murder” of the fetus, because the fetus needs the environment of its mother’s womb for its continued life, then what are the other obligations that we—can coerce upon the mother? For example, suppose that if the mother does not eat a balanced diet, or drinks liquor, or allows herself to get upset, the fetus will die, or, if not that, the fetus will be in some concrete way, injured? May we send in a Gestapo to coerce the proper diet, to coerce proper behavior, upon the mother? The “murder” thesis logically implies totalitarian control over pregnant women.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 775

The fundamental axiom of the anti-abortionists is that abortion is murder. But murder is not the only crime against human beings. If the fetus is to have full human rights, then it must be protected against more crimes than murder. There is, for example, assault. Surely, when a pregnant woman drinks alcohol, or smokes cigarettes, this ingestion causes an assault against, an “insult to,” the fetus. But, in that case, these are tort actions which must be declared illegal, and stoppable by injunction. And not just cigarettes and alcohol. If a pregnant woman eats an unbalanced diet, the fetus suffers. If a pregnant woman is overly emotional, this injures the fetus. But then all these actions become torts and crimes, and must be proceeded against by full majesty of the law.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1043

The pornography as destruction and as “violence against women” argument is pure bilge. First, of course, the women and men who participate in pornography are doing so voluntarily, and usually with enthusiasm, considering the money involved.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1182

SLAVERY

Under slavery, slaves are either sold as a whole, as “capital,” or are rented out to other masters. In short, slave labor has a unit, or rental, price as well as a capital value.

Capital, Interest, and Rent, pp. 2–3

… Under slavery, where laborers are owned, they, too, become capitalized, and the present price of slaves becomes the capitalized value of expected future earnings (or “rents”) of slaves, discounted by the social rate of time preference.

Capital, Interest, and Rent, p. 17

The long-run tendency will be for the business of slavery to yield a return equal to that of any other industry.

Classical Economics, p. 393

… the essence of slavery is that human beings, with their inherent freedom of will, with individual desires and convictions and purposes, are used as capital, as tools for the benefit of their master. The slave is therefore habitually forced into types and degrees of work that he would not have freely undertaken; by necessity, therefore, the bit and the lash become the motor of the slave system. The myth of the kindly master camouflages the inherent brutality and savagery of the slave system.

Conceived in Liberty v. 1, p. 73; p. 63

While a man’s property is alienable and may be transferred from one person to another, a person’s will is not …

Conceived in Liberty v. 1, p. 58; p. 48

… a man can alienate his labor service, but he cannot sell the capitalized future value of that service. In short, he cannot, in nature, sell himself into slavery and have this sale enforced …

Ethics of Liberty, p. 40

When slavery was a common practice, much discussion raged as to whether or how much the master should be monetarily compensated for the loss of his slaves if slavery were to be abolished. This discussion was palpably absurd. For what do we do when we have apprehended a thief and recovered a stolen watch: do we compensate the thief for the loss of the watch, or do we punish him? Surely, the enslavement of a man’s very person and being is a far more heinous crime than the theft of his watch, and should be dealt with accordingly.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 61

… there was only one possible moral solution for the slave question: immediate and unconditional abolition, with no compensation to the slavemasters. Indeed, any compensation should have been the other way—to repay the oppressed slaves for their lifetime of slavery. A vital part of such necessary compensation would have been to grant the plantation lands not to the slavemaster, who scarcely had valid title to any property, but to the slaves themselves, whose labor, on our “homesteading” principle, was mixed with the soil to develop the plantations. In short, at the very least, elementary libertarian justice required not only the immediate freeing of the slaves, but also the immediate turning over to the slaves, again without compensation to the masters, of the plantation lands on which they had worked and sweated.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 75

… there are certain vital things which, in natural fact and in the nature of man, are inalienable, i.e., they cannot in fact be alienated, even voluntarily. Specifically, a person cannot alienate his will, more particularly his control over his own mind and body. Each man has control over his own mind and body. Each man has control over his own will and person, and he is, if you wish, “stuck” with that inherent and inalienable ownership. Since his will and control over his own person are inalienable, then so also are his rights to control that person and will.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 135

… by far the overwhelming portion of all enslavement and murder in the history of the world has come from the hands of government.

For a New Liberty, p. 57

If there is anything a libertarian must be squarely and totally against, it is involuntary servitude—forced labor—an act which denies the most elemental right of self-ownership. “Liberty” and “slavery” have ever been recognized to be polar opposites. The libertarian, therefore, is totally opposed to slavery.

For a New Liberty, p. 97

… the issue is to oppose slavery as absolute moral evil.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 42

… outside the economy of slavery, it is impossible to sell your “human capital,” so that it cannot be used as an economic concept with a monetary value.

… Making Economic Sense, p. 119

Under slavery, the master treats the slaves as he does his livestock, horses, and other animals, using them as factors of production to gratify his wants, and feeding, housing them, etc., just enough to enable them to continue in the master’s service.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 81

The interpersonal relation under slavery is known as hegemonic. The relationship is one of command and obedience, the commands being enforced by threats of violence. The master uses the slaves as instruments, as factors of production, for gratifying his wants. Thus, slavery, or hegemony, is defined as a system in which one must labor under the orders of another under the threat of violence.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 82

… a man cannot permanently transfer his will, even though he may transfer much of his services and his property.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 164

… the will of each person is by its nature inalienable.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 176

… on the free market, slave contracts are not enforceable.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 290

Slaves might perhaps be useful for sweeping floors or digging ditches; they cannot be successfully used for creative work, requiring ability and originality.

Science, Technology, and Government, p. 23

SMITH, ADAM

Smith, and still more Ricardo, were pushed into their labor cost theory by concentrating on the long-run “natural” price of products.

Classical Economics, p. 19

Adam Smith purged economic thought of the very existence of the entrepreneur …

Classical Economics, p. 25

Adam Smith believed that the rate of profit, or the long-run rate of interest return, is determined by the quantity of accumulated capital, so that more capital will lead to a falling rate of profit. While this theory is not fully correct, it at least understands that there is some connection between saving, capital accumulation, and long-run interest or profit.

Classical Economics, p. 88

… free traders of the eighteenth century, including Adam Smith, based their doctrines on the law of “absolute advantage.”

Classical Economics, p. 94

Most of the anti-bullionist writers applied Adam Smith’s dictum that bank credit cannot inflate the currency if confined to short-term, self-liquidating, “real bills.”

Classical Economics, p. 177

Smith was anti-rationalist … was concerned to purge economic theory of all subjective utility considerations, so he had to discard mutual benefit as the reason for exchange. Indeed, in contrast to Mises’s insight that the division of labor (the base of exchange) stems from the diversity and inequality of talents and interests among men, Smith maintained that all people and children are originally almost totally the same, and that the existing division of labor and of occupation willy-nilly pushes them into specialization and differences of interest. …

If for Smith, the diversity and inequality of talent is not the root cause of the division of labor but the effect, what in the world is the root cause? Smith, like many social scientists who do not know the cause of a human phenomenon, falls back on some sort of built-in “instinct” …

Economic Controversies, p. 197n46

Supply-siders consider themselves heirs of Adam Smith, and in one sense they are right. For Smith, too, driven in his case by a deep-seated Calvinist hostility to luxurious consumption, sought to use government to raise the social proportion of investment to consumption beyond the desires of the free market. One method he advocated was high taxes on luxurious consumption; another was usury laws, to drive interest rates below the free market level, and thereby coercively channel or ration savings and credit into the hands of sober, industrious prime business borrowers, and out of the hands of “projectors” and “prodigal” consumers who would be willing to pay high interest charges.

Economic Controversies, p. 522

Adam Smith (1723–1790) is a mystery in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma. The mystery is the enormous and unprecedented gap between Smith’s exalted reputation and the reality of his dubious contribution to economic thought.

Smith’s reputation almost blinds the sun. From shortly after his own day until very recently, he was thought to have created the science of economics virtually de novo. He was universally hailed as the Founding Father.

… Smith was scarcely the founder of economic science, a science which existed since the medieval scholastics and, in its modern form, since Richard Cantillon.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 435

… originated nothing that was true … whatever he originated was wrong … Adam Smith was a shameless plagiarist. …

Even though an inveterate plagiarist, Smith had a Columbus complex, accusing close friends incorrectly of plagiarizing him. And even though a plagiarist, he plagiarized badly, adding new fallacies to the truths he lifted.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, pp. 435–36

… Smith not only contributed nothing of value to economic thought; his economics was a grave deterioration from his predecessors: from Cantillon, from Turgot, from his teacher Hutcheson, from the Spanish scholastics, even—oddly enough—from his own previous works.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 436

… the much revered Wealth of Nations is a huge, sprawling, inchoate, confused tome, rife with vagueness, ambiguity and deep inner contradictions.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 436

Adam Smith did not found the science of economics …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 436

… Smith had shunted economics off on a wrong road …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 437

… for Smith the division of labor took on swollen and gigantic importance …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 441

… Smith failed to apply his analysis of the division of labor to international trade … domestically, Smith placed far too much importance on the division of labor within a factory or industry, while neglecting the more significant division of labor among industries.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 442

For Smith, then, labor on material objects was “productive”; but labor on, say, consumer services, on immaterial production, was “unproductive.”

… Smith’s imprimatur on material production, therefore, was an indirect way of advocating investment in an accumulation of capital goods as against the very goal of producing capital goods: increased consumption.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 444

Adam Smith’s doctrine on value was an unmitigated disaster …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 448

It was, indeed, Adam Smith who was almost solely responsible for the injection into economics of the labor theory of value. And hence it was Smith who may plausibly be held responsible for the emergence and the momentous consequences of Marxism.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 453

Adam Smith also gave hostage to the later emergence of socialism by his repeatedly stated view that rent and profit are deductions from the produce of labor.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 455

… the greatest of the many defects in Smith’s theory was his totally discarding Cantillon’s and Turgot’s brilliant analysis of the entrepreneur.… the very idea of the entrepreneur as a risk-bearer and forecaster was thrown away …

The political implications of this omission were also not lost on nineteenth century socialists. For if there is no role for entrepreneurial profits in a market economy, then any existing profits must be “exploitative” …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, pp. 459–60

Smith’s focus on the long run, in fact, led him to apply his general labor cost-of-production theory of value to the value of money. The value of money, i.e., the value of the metal commodity gold or silver, then becomes the embodiment of the labor cost of producing it. …

… Smith therefore explicitly denies that an increase in bank notes can raise the prices of commodities.… If he ever conceded that an increase in the quantity of paper money could affect values, even temporarily, then Smith would have had to admit an enormous hole in his labor-cost theory. For the “labor cost” involved in printing paper money obviously bears no relation whatever to the exchange value of that money. …

… He thus set economic theory once again on an erroneous and fateful road by embracing the institution of fractional-reserve-credit.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, pp. 461–63

… Adam Smith contributed nothing of value to economic thought; if, in fact, he introduced numerous fallacies …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 463

… scarcely originated laissez-faire thought …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 464

… Adam Smith’s championing of laissez-faire was scarcely consistent. …

… the list of exceptions Smith makes to laissez-faire is surprisingly long. …

In addition to the navigation acts and public education, Adam Smith advocated the following forms of government intervention in the economy:

• Regulation of bank paper …;

• Public works …;

• Government coinage …;

• The Post Office …;

• Compulsory building of fire walls …;

• Some restrictions of the export of corn (wheat) …; forcing all payment to be in money.

There is also a particularly lengthy list of taxes advocated by Smith …

… Adam Smith advocated the soak-the-rich policy of progressive income taxation.

Perhaps Smith’s most flagrant violation of laissez-faire was his strong advocacy of rigid usury laws … he urged an interest rate ceiling of 5 percent …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, pp. 465–67

… Smith had gone against his eighteenth century colleagues in adopting crucial aspects of John Law’s inflationary doctrine, in particular praising expansion of bank credit and money within a specie standard framework. In this way, Smith paved the way for later apologetics on behalf of the Bank of England and its generation of credit expansion.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 500

… Smith totally set back price and value theory … in some respects, it has never fully recovered.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 500

Smith’s labor theory of value led to Marxism and all the horrors to which that creed has given rise …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 501

… the common picture of economic thought after Smith needs to be reversed. In the conventional view, Adam Smith, the towering founder, by his theoretical genius and by the sheer weight of his knowledge of institutional facts, singlehandedly created the discipline of political economy as well as the public policy of the free market, and did so out of a jumble of mercantilist fallacies and earlier absurd scholastic notions of a “just price.” The real story is almost the opposite. Before Smith, centuries of scholastic analysis had developed an excellent value theory and monetary theory, along with corresponding free market and hard-money conclusions. Originally embedded among the scholastics in a systematic framework of property rights and contract law based on natural law theory, economic theory and policy had been elaborated still further into a veritable science by Cantillon and Turgot in the eighteenth century. Far from founding the discipline of economics singlehanded, Adam Smith turned his back not only the scholastic and French traditions, but even on his own mentors in the considerably more diluted natural law of the Scottish Enlightenment …

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 501

Two hundred years ago, Adam Smith pointed out that the developing division of labor is a key to the advance of any economy above the most primitive level.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 249

It is freedom and the free market, as Adam Smith well pointed out, that develop the “wealth of nations.”

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 253

Despite the enormous emphasis on specialization and the division of labor in the Wealth of Nations, much of Smith’s discussion was misplaced and misleading.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 299

SOCIAL MOBILITY

… only a free society is casteless, and therefore only freedom will permit mobility of income according to productivity. Statism, on the other hand, is likely to freeze the economy into a mold of (nonproductive) inequality.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1308

SOCIAL SECURITY

… Social Security is bankrupt and should be abolished …

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 677

The Social Security system is not only coercive, it is the biggest single racket of all the welfare programs.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 951

The Social Security System is the biggest single racket in the entire panoply of welfare-state measures …

… The whole system is a vast Ponzi scheme, with the difference that Ponzi’s notorious swindle at least rested solely on his ability to con his victims, whereas the government swindlers, of course, rely also on a vast apparatus of tax-coercion.

Making Economic Sense, pp. 68–69

… the public must pay twice for one payment of social security. The program is essentially one of making more palatable a general taxation of lower-income, wage-earning groups.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 958

SOCIALISM

… Nazi Germany was not the reflection of big business but was a variant of socialism and collectivism.

Betrayal of the American Right, p. 61

… socialist central planning simply cannot operate an advanced industrial economy.

Betrayal of the American Right, p. 183

… the alleged ideal of communism had come to the world as a messianic and millennial creed.

Classical Economics, p. 299

… if all property is owned in common and each person is equal, then the incentive to work is negative …

Classical Economics, p. 302

… certain features are broadly alike in all visions of communism. Private property is eliminated, individualism goes by the board, individuality is flattened, all property is owned and controlled communally, and the individual units of the new collective organism are in some vague way equal to one another.

Classical Economics, p. 318

… the essence of the communist society is a secularized religion rather than economics.

Classical Economics, pp. 331–32

… the terrible economic suffering of mankind under communism would be fully matched by its intellectual and spiritual deprivation.

Classical Economics, p. 333

… socialism cannot calculate, it cannot run a complex modern economic system.

Economic Controversies, p. 186

In a socialist state, the government has arrogated to itself virtually all property and power of the country.

Economic Controversies, p. 446

If the shell of ownership is left and its contents confiscated by the State, there will be no incentive for owners … to allocate the assets to the highest bidders and most productive uses.

Economic Controversies, p. 594

… socialism can’t calculate …

Economic Controversies, p. 678

… socialism would lack the indispensable tool that private entrepreneurs use to appraise and calculate: the existence of a market in the means of production, a market that brings about money prices based on genuine profit-seeking exchanges by private owners of these means of production. Since the very essence of socialism is collective ownership of the means of production, the planning board would not be able to plan, or to make any sort of rational economic decisions. Its decisions would necessarily be completely arbitrary and chaotic, and therefore the existence of a socialist planned economy is literally “impossible” …

Economic Controversies, p. 829

… it is absurd for the socialist planning board to tell their managers to “play market,” to act as if they are owners of their firms in trying to maximize profits and avoid losses.

Economic Controversies, p. 837

… there is also no way for a socialist system to rationally estimate the costs (which are dependent on prices in factor markets) of any process of production.

Economic Controversies, p. 840

… any rational allocation of productive resources under socialism is indeed impossible.

Economic Controversies, p. 844

Socialism, like liberalism and against conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 28

Communism was a genuine revolutionary movement that ruthlessly displaced and overthrew the old ruling elites, while fascism, on the contrary, cemented into power the old ruling classes. Hence, fascism was a counterrevolutionary movement that froze a set of monopoly privileges upon society; in short, fascism was the apotheosis of modern State monopoly capitalism.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 34

Socialism is neither genuinely radical nor truly revolutionary. Socialism is a reactionary reversion, a self-contradictory attempt to achieve classical radical ends: liberty, progress, the withering away or abolition of the State, by using old-fashioned statist and Tory means: collectivism and State control. Socialism is a New Toryism doomed to rapid failure whenever it is tried …

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 193

At the root of all forms of communism, compulsory or voluntary, lies a profound hatred of individual excellence, a denial of the natural or intellectual superiority of some men over others, and a desire to tear down every individual to the level of a communal ant-heap. In the name of a phony “humanism,” an irrational and profoundly antihuman egalitarianism is to rob every individual of his specific and precious humanity.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 201

Socialism was a confused and hybrid movement because it tried to achieve the liberal goals of freedom, peace, and industrial harmony and growth—goals which can only be achieved through liberty and the separation of government from virtually everything—by imposing the old conservative means of statism, collectivism, and hierarchical privilege. It was a movement which could only fail, which indeed did fail miserably …

For a New Liberty, p. 16

… any attempt at communist rule will automatically become class rule …

For a New Liberty, p. 35

… socialism is a disaster because it cannot plan an industrial economy for lack of profit-and-loss incentives, and for lack of a genuine price system or property rights in capital, land, and other means of production.… neither socialism nor the various intermediary forms of statism and interventionism can work. Hence, given a general commitment to an industrial economy, these forms of statism would have to be discarded, and be replaced by freedom and free markets.

For a New Liberty, pp. 395–96

… fascism was a counter-revolutionary movement that froze a set of monopoly privileges upon society; in short, fascism was the apotheosis of modern State monopoly capitalism.

Left and Right, p. 15

Socialism confronts its inner contradiction most starkly. Desperately, it tries to fulfill its proclaimed goals of industrial growth, higher standards of living for the masses, and eventual withering away of the State, and is increasingly unable to do so with its collectivist means.

Left and Right, p. 23

Socialism is neither genuinely radical nor truly revolutionary. Socialism is a reactionary reversion, a self-contradictory attempt to achieve classical radical ends [to] liberty, progress, the withering away or abolition of the State, by using old-fashioned statist and Tory means: collectivism and State control. Socialism is a New Toryism doomed to rapid failure whenever it is tried, a failure demonstrated by the collapse of central planning in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 29

… fascism: an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 173

… socialism cannot calculate … socialism and communism simply cannot function in a modern industrial society. And since the immense population of the modern world requires an industrial society to survive, this means that socialism, being totally dysfunctional, cannot endure and must inevitably collapse.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 175

The socialist method is both despotic and highly inefficient …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 215

… socialist planning must inevitably lead to totalitarianism … socialism cannot rationally calculate because it lacks a free market pricing system …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 516

… collectivism itself has had a black economic record …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 525

… statistics are a slippery groundwork for political action.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1182

Marx, as well as all the other communists of his day, used “socialism” and “communism” interchangeably to describe their ideal society.

Logic of Action Two, p. 394

Ludwig von Mises, at the dawn of the Socialist century, warned, in a famous article, that socialism simply could not work: that it could not run an industrial economy, and could not even satisfy the goals of the central planners themselves, much less of the mass of consumers in whose name they speak.

Making Economic Sense, p. 414

… socialism doesn’t work …

Making Economic Sense, p. 415

The enemy of freedom, of prosperity, of truly rational economics is socialism period …

Making Economic Sense, p. 415

A socialist economy will inevitably be dictatorial.

Making Economic Sense, p. 417

… the only practical and realistic path, the only path toward reform that truly works and works quickly, is the total abolition of socialism and statism across the board.

Making Economic Sense, p. 422

… socialism was never a monolith.

Making Economic Sense, p. 425

… a socialist economic system cannot calculate, since it lacks a market, and hence lacks prices for producers’ and especially for capital goods.… Socialism is that system in which the State forcibly seizes control of all the means of production in the economy. The reason for the impossibility of calculation under socialism is that one agent owns or directs the use of all the resources in the economy.… there is no possibility of calculation anywhere in the production structure, since production processes would be only internal and without markets. There could be no calculation, and therefore complete economic irrationality and chaos would prevail …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 614–15

… to demonstrate that the calculation difficulty does not exist in the ERE is not a solution …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 616

When government ownership or control extends to the entire productive system, then the economic system is called socialism. Socialism, in short, is the violent abolition of the market, the compulsory monopolization of the entire productive sphere by the State.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 958

… Mises’s demonstration of the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism has never been successfully refuted.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 958

… since ownership is, de facto, the control of a resource, a Nazi, Fascist, or other “centrally planned” system is as much “socialism” as a Communist regime that officially nationalizes property.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 959

All services, all activities, can be provided in two ways only: by freedom or by coercion. The former is the way of the market; the latter, of the State. If all services were organized on the market, the result would be a purely free-market system; if all were organized by the State, the result would be socialism.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 1244–45

State socialism could not plan or allocate rationally …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1268

Socialism—or collectivism—occurs when the State owns all the means of production. It is the compulsory abolition and prohibition of private enterprise, and the monopolization of the entire productive sphere by the State. Socialism, therefore, extends the principle of compulsory governmental monopoly from a few isolated enterprises to the whole economic system. It is the violent abolition of the market.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 1272–73

… ownership [is] the exclusive control of a resource. It is clear, therefore, that a “planned economy” which leaves nominal ownership in the hands of the previous private owners, but which places the actual control and direction of resources in the hands of the State, is as much socialism as is the formal nationalization of property. The Nazi and Fascist regimes were as socialist as the Communist system that nationalizes all productive property.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1273

Economics is concerned only with the powers of ownership or control that the State exercises.… Socialism may be monarchical; it may be proletarian; it may equalize fortunes; it may increase inequality. Its essence is always the same: total coercive State dictation over the economy.

The distance between the poles of the purely free market, on the one hand, and total collectivism on the other, is a continuum involving different “mixes” of the freedom principle and the coercive, hegemonic principle.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1274

Socialism cannot calculate and hence must either shift to a market economy or revert to a barbaric standard of living after its plunder of the pre-existing capital structure has been exhausted.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1364

… Communism is simply one consistent wing of socialism … the reason why Communism must be considered an enemy is precisely that it represents socialism or extreme statism …

Strictly Confidential, p. 92

… Communism is simply one wing of socialism …

Strictly Confidential, p. 333

SOCIETY

There is, in fact, no “social” point of view, since “society” as an entity does not exist.

Classical Economics, p. 89

… “society” does not itself exist, but is made up only of individual people …

Economic Controversies, p. 56

“Society,” however, is not a real entity; it is only a convenient short-hand term for an array of all existing individuals.

Economic Controversies, pp. 321–22

… there is no such entity as society or the state …

Economic Controversies, p. 409

… society—the division of labor, the body of knowledge and culture, etc.—is in no sense the state. The state contributes no division of labor to the production process, and does not transmit knowledge or carry civilization forward. Therefore, whatever each of us may owe to “society,” the state can hardly claim, any more than any other group in society, to be surrogate for all social relations in the country.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 470

… society’s “stereotype” is simply a general insight into the facts of reality.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 10

… the society of absolute self-ownership for all rests on the primordial fact of natural self-ownership by every man, and on the fact that each man may only live and prosper as he exercises his natural freedom of choice, adopts values, learns how to achieve them, etc. By virtue of being a man, he must use his mind to adopt ends and means; if someone aggresses against him to change his freely-selected course, this violates his nature; it violates the way he must function. In short, an aggressor interposes violence to thwart the natural course of a man’s freely adopted ideas and values.

Ethics of Liberty, pp. 46–47

The libertarian, however, is an individualist; he believes that one of the prime errors in social theory is to treat “society” as if it were an actually existing entity. “Society” is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding “rights” of its own; at other times as an existing evil which can be blamed for all the ills of the world. The individualist holds that only individuals exist, think, feel, choose, and act; and that “society” is not a living entity but simply a label for a set of interacting individuals. Treating society as a thing that chooses and acts, then, serves to obscure the real forces at work.

For a New Liberty, p. 45

“Societies” or “groups” have no independent existence aside from the actions of their individual members. Thus, to say that “governments” act is merely a metaphor; actually, certain individuals are in a certain relationship with other individuals and act in a way that they and the other individuals recognize as “governmental.”

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 2–3

Any continuing pattern of interpersonal exchanges is called a society …

The term “society,” then, denotes a pattern of interpersonal exchanges among human beings. It is obviously absurd to treat “society” as “real,” with some independent force of its own. There is no reality to society apart from the individuals who compose it and whose actions determine the type of social pattern that will be established.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 83–84

A society based on voluntary exchanges is called a contractual society. In contrast to the hegemonic society based on the rule of violence, the contractual type of society is based on freely entered contractual relations between individuals. Agreements by individuals to make exchanges are called contracts, and a society based on voluntary contractual agreements is a contractual society. It is the society of the unhampered market.

In a contractual society, each individual benefits by the exchange-contract that he makes. Each individual is an actor free to make his own decisions at every step of the way. Thus, the relations among people in an unhampered market are “symmetrical”; there is equality in the sense that each person has equal power to make his own exchange-decisions. This is in contrast to a hegemonic relationship, where power is asymmetrical—where the dictator makes all the decisions for his subjects except the one decision to obey, as it were, at bayonet point.

Thus, the distinguishing features of the contractual society, of the unhampered market, are self-responsibility, freedom from violence, full power to make one’s own decisions (except the decision to institute violence against another), and benefits for all participating individuals. The distinguishing features of a hegemonic society are the rule of violence, the surrender of the power to make one’s own decisions to a dictator, and exploitation of subjects for the benefit of the masters.… that existing societies may be totally hegemonic, totally contractual, or various mixtures of different degrees of the two …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 90–91

In contrast to the hegemonic form of society, in which one person or one group of persons exploits the others, a contractual society leaves each person free to benefit himself in the market and as a consequence to benefit others as well.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 100

… a free society will in the long run lead to general abundance and is the necessary condition for that abundance.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 655

… there is no such existent entity as “society” apart from individuals …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 964

A free society means a world in which no one aggresses against the person or property of others …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1047

… in a stateless society there would be no regular, legalized channel for crime and aggression, no government apparatus the control of which provides a secure monopoly for invasion of person and property. When a State exists, there does exist such a built-in channel, namely, the coercive taxation power, and the compulsory monopoly of forcible protection.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1054

Society or the public cannot own anything; only an individual or a set of individuals can do so.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1208

Whenever someone begins to talk about “society” or “society’s” interest coming before “mere individuals and their interest,” a good operative rule is this: guard your pocketbook. And guard yourself! Because behind the facade of “society,” there is always a group of power-hungry doctrinaires and exploiters, ready to take your money and to order your actions and your life. For, somehow, they “are” society!

The only intelligible way of defining society is as the array of voluntary interpersonal relations. And preeminent among such voluntary interrelations is the free market! In short, the market (and the interrelations arising from the market) is society, or at least the bulk and the heart of it.

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 134

SOUND MONEY

A genuine free market in money, then, would allow the market to select whatever metals it wishes as media of exchange and units of account, without government attempts to fix the exchange rates between them.

Economic Controversies, p. 214

The sound money is the genuine gold standard; “genuine” in the sense that each currency is defined as a certain unit of weight of gold, and is redeemable in that weight.

Making Economic Sense, p. 295

… one way in which the government finances its own deficits and creates perpetual inflation is through what is essentially the printing of counterfeit money. To end this critical and destructive feature of statism and government intervention, we must return to a sound, free-market money, which means a return to a gold-coin standard for the dollar and the abolition of another crucial despotic federal agency not subject to popular or Congressional control: the Federal Reserve System …

Making Economic Sense, p. 493

SPECULATION

… speculators, by anticipating the future, help to smooth fluctuations and to allocate oil or any other commodity to its most-valued uses, over time.

Making Economic Sense, p. 391

… any actor, when employing means, estimates that he will thus arrive at his desired goal. But he never has certain knowledge of the future. All his actions are of necessity speculations based on his judgment of the course of future events.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 7

… a growth of specialized speculation will tend to improve the forecasts of the equilibrium point and hasten the arrival at equilibrium …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 143

Entrepreneurship is also the dominant characteristic of buyers and sellers who act speculatively, who specialize in anticipating higher or lower prices in the future. Their entire action consists in attempts to anticipate future market prices, and their success depends on how accurate or erroneous their forecasts are. Since, … correct speculation quickens the movement toward equilibrium, and erroneous speculation tends to correct itself, the activity of these speculators tends to hasten the arrival of an equilibrium position.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 158–59

The general effect of speculation is to make both the supply and demand curves more elastic … The more people engage in such (correct) speculation, the more elastic will be the curves, and, by implication, the more rapidly will the equilibrium price be reached.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 251

… all speculation, on the free market, is self-correcting and speeds adjustment, rather than a cause of economic trouble.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 792

SPENCER, HERBERT

… Herbert Spencer, in his critique of utilitarianism, was correct: it is often easier to know what is right than what is expedient.

Classical Economics, p. 60

The young Herbert Spencer, in his great treatise Social Statics, declared that an individual should be able to opt out of taxation, to “ignore the State,” and to renounce its services.

Economic Controversies, p. 477

Th[e] libertarian credo was formulated with particular cogency by Herbert Spencer in his “Law of Equal Liberty” as the suggested fundamental core of his social philosophy …

Economic Controversies, p. 626

The great philosopher Herbert Spencer pointed out the despotism inherent in compulsory education.

Education: Free and Compulsory, p. 15

… until very recently in this century there have been virtually no libertarian political philosophers. And even in the far more libertarian nineteenth century, only Herbert Spencer’s great Social Statics(1851) set forth a thorough and systematic theory of liberty.

Ethics of Liberty, p. xlvii

… Herbert Spencer embodies within himself much of the decline of liberalism in the nineteenth century.… Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal, indeed virtually a pure libertarian. But, as the virus of sociology and Social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer abandoned libertarianism as a dynamic historical movement, although at first without abandoning it in pure theory. While looking forward to an eventual victory of pure liberty, Spencer began to see its victory as inevitable, but only after millennia of gradual evolution, and thus, in actual fact, Spencer abandoned liberalism as a fighting, radical creed and confined his liberalism in practice to a weary, rearguard action against the growing collectivism of the late nineteenth century. Interestingly enough, Spencer’s tired shift “rightward” in strategy soon became a shift rightward in theory as well.

For a New Liberty, p. 21

… the great late-nineteenth-century individualist English philosopher …

For a New Liberty, p. 159

Egalitarianism is … a literally senseless social philosophy. Its only meaningful formulation is the goal of “equality of liberty”—formulated by Herbert Spencer in his famous Law of Equal Freedom: “Every man has freedom to do all he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.” This goal does not attempt to make every individual’s total condition equal—an absolutely impossible task; instead, it advocates liberty—a condition of absence of coercion over person and property for every man.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1311

The “Law of Equal Freedom” could well be renamed “The Law of Total Freedom.”

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1312

… Spencer’s Law of Equal Freedom is really a redundant version of the “extreme” statement and that the first part implies the proviso clause.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1341

It is quite easy to define the Spencerian formula clearly enough so that laissez-faire and only laissez-faire follows from it. The important point to remember is never to use such vague expressions as “injury,” “harm,” or “control,” but specific terms, such as “physical interference” or “threats of physical violence.”

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1344

STATE

… plunderer of private property.

Classical Economics, p. 334

The state under any other name would smell as acrid.

Classical Economics, p. 335

The essence of the state throughout history is a minority of the population, constituting a power elite or a “ruling class,” governing and living off the majority, or the “ruled.” Since a majority cannot live parasitically off a minority without the economy and the social system breaking down very quickly, and since the majority can never act permanently by itself but must always be led by an oligarchy, every state will subsist by plundering the majority in behalf of a ruling minority.

Conceived in Liberty v. 3, p. 351; p. 1115

… the State is the organization of robbery systematized and writ large. The State is the only legal institution in society that acquires its revenue by the use of coercion, by using enough violence and threat of violence on its victims to ensure their paying the desired tribute. The State benefits itself at the expense of its robbed victims. The State is, therefore, a centralized, regularized organization of theft. Its payments extracted by coercion are called “taxation” …

Economic Controversies, p. 459

… “society”—the pattern of voluntary exchanges of goods and services—is most emphatically not identical to the State, the coercive extractor of taxation.

Economic Controversies, p. 496

Throughout history, states have existed as instruments for organized predation and exploitation.… Generally, the State has its inception in naked banditry and conquest, after which the conquerors settle down among the subject population to exact permanent and continuing tribute in the form of “taxation” and to parcel out the land of the peasants in huge tracts to the conquering warlords, who then proceed to extract “rent.”

Economic Controversies, p. 656

… the state is organized theft, organized robbery, organized exploitation. And this essential nature of the state is highlighted by the fact that the state ever rests upon the crucial instrument of taxation.

Economic Controversies, p. 675

… the state is simply robbery writ large, on an enormous scale, but robbery legitimated by intellectual opinion.

Economic Controversies, p. 676

The nub of the distinction between State and market is that, on the market, all parties gain and benefit from market actions, whereas, in State action, the gains of one group can only be at the expense of others.

Economic Controversies, p. 930

Statism logically implies that the state owns all the property in the land, and that all who live on or use such property do so only by the sufferance of the “true” owner.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 249

But the State! The State’s very being rests on violence, on compulsion. As a matter of fact, the very feature that distinguishes the State from other individuals and groups is that the State has the only (legal) power to use violence. In contrast to all other individuals and organizations, the State issues decrees which must be obeyed at the risk of suffering prison or the electric chair.

Education: Free and Compulsory, p. 10

… the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 57

Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation. The classic paradigm was a conquering tribe pausing in its time-honored method of looting and murdering a conquered tribe, to realize that the time-span of plunder would be longer and more secure, and the situation more pleasant, if the conquered tribe were allowed to live and produce, with the conquerors settling among them as rulers exacting a steady annual tribute.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 60

… one of the basic doctrines of the State was to identify itself with the territory it governed. Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State’s advantage.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 66

… the State is profoundly and inherently anticapitalist.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 79

The State is a group of people who have managed to acquire a virtual monopoly of the use of violence throughout a given territorial area. In particular, it has acquired a monopoly of aggressive violence, for States generally recognize the right of individuals to use violence (though not against States, of course) in self-defense. The State then uses this monopoly to wield power over the inhabitants of the area and to enjoy the material fruits of that power. The State, then, is the only organization in society that regularly and openly obtains its monetary revenues by the use of aggressive violence; all other individuals and organizations (except if delegated that right by the State) can obtain wealth only by peaceful production and by voluntary exchange of their respective products. This use of violence to obtain its revenue (called “taxation”) is the keystone of State power.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, pp. 120–21

… the State has always been the great enemy and invader of the rights of private property.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 200

… the State … the inherent enemy of liberty and, indeed, of genuine law.

Ethics of Liberty, p. xlix

The State indeed performs many important and necessary functions … But this in no way demonstrates that only the State can perform such functions, or, indeed, that it performs them even passably well.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 161

… the crucial monopoly is the State’s control of the use of violence …

Ethics of Liberty, p. 162

… the State, which subsists on taxation, is a vast criminal organization …

Ethics of Liberty, p. 166

The State, by its very nature, must violate the generally accepted moral laws to which most people adhere. Most people are agreed on the injustice and criminality of murder and theft. The customs, rules, and laws of all societies condemn these actions. The State, then, is always in a vulnerable position, despite its seeming age-old might. What particularly needs to be done is to enlighten the public on the State’s true nature, so that they can see that the State habitually violates the generally accepted injunctions against robbery and murder, that the State is the necessary violator of the commonly accepted moral and criminal law.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 170

The State may therefore be defined as that organization which possesses either or both (in actual fact, almost always both) of the following characteristics: (a) it acquires its revenue by physical coercion (taxation); and (b) it achieves a compulsory monopoly of force and of ultimate decision-making power over a given territorial area. Both of these essential activities of the State necessarily constitute criminal aggression and depredation of the just rights of private property of its subjects (including self-ownership). For the first constitutes and establishes theft on a grand scale; while the second prohibits the free competition of defense and decision-making agencies within a given territorial area-prohibiting the voluntary purchase and sale of defense and judicial services.

Ethics of Liberty, pp. 172–73

In a truly free society, a society where individual rights of person and property are maintained, the State, then, would necessarily cease to exist.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 173

… no one is morally required to obey the State.… “stealing” from the State, for example, is removing property from criminal hands. …

Lying to the State, then, also becomes a fortiori morally legitimate. Just as no one is morally required to answer a robber truthfully when he asks if there are any valuables in one’s house, so no one can be morally required to answer truthfully similar questions asked by the State, e.g., when filling out income tax returns.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 183

The State is not, as most utilitarian free-market economists like to think, a legitimate social institution that tends to be bumbling and inefficient in most of its activities. On the contrary, the State is an inherently illegitimate institution of organized aggression, of organized and regularized crime against the persons and properties of its subjects. Rather than necessary to society, it is a profoundly antisocial institution which lives parasitically off of the productive activities of private citizens. Morally, it must be considered as illegitimate and outside of the ordinary libertarian legal system … from the point of view of justice and morality, the State can own no property, require no obedience, enforce no contracts made with it, and indeed, cannot exist at all.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 187

… each State has a monopoly of violence …

Ethics of Liberty, p. 194

… every State where the facts are available originated by a process of violence, conquest, and exploitation …

Ethics of Liberty, p. 231

… throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State. In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. But if we look at the State naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible crimes. The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls “war,” or sometimes “suppression of subversion”; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls “conscription”; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls “taxation.”

For a New Liberty, pp. 28–29

… the State arrogates to itself a virtual monopoly of violence and of ultimate decision-making in society.

For a New Liberty, p. 58

… the typical model of the origin of the State was not via a voluntary “social contract” but by the conquest of one tribe by another. The original liberty of the tribe or the peasantry thus falls victim to the conquerors. At first, the conquering tribe killed and looted the victims and rode on. But at some time the conquerors decided that it would be more profitable to settle down among the conquered peasantry and rule and loot them on a permanent and systematic basis. The periodic tribute exacted from the conquered subjects eventually came to be called “taxation.” And, with equal generality, the conquering chieftains parcelled out the land of the peasantry to the various warlords, who were then able to settle down and collect feudal “rent” from the peasantry. The peasants were often enslaved, or rather enserfed, to the land itself to provide a continuing source of exploited labor for the feudal lords.

For a New Liberty, p. 78

… what is the State anyway but organized banditry? What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked, scale? What is war but mass murder on a scale impossible by private police forces? What is conscription but mass enslavement? Can anyone envision a private police force getting away with a tiny fraction of what States get away with, and do habitually, year after year, century after century?

For a New Liberty, pp. 293–94

The State is the major enemy of mankind …

For a New Liberty, p. 385

… the State is a parasitic enemy of society …

For a New Liberty, p. 387

… the State is the great predatory enemy of the human race, that the State is, in its very being, the organization and regularization of predation, exploitation, and robbery.

Left and Right, p. 360

… the enemy is the State …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 65

… it is axiom of libertarian thought that the State is a criminal gang, living off the robbery of tax-coercion and using these funds to murder, pillage, enslave, and endow favored groups with special privilege. The State is founded and has its very being in the use of aggressive violence. Therefore, any violence used against the State is moral, for it is the moral equivalent of using violence to protect one’s person and property from armed marauders. The act of revolution is, therefore, always moral.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 147

… the State, any state per se, is morally evil because it is founded and has its very being in permanent aggression against the life and property of its subjects.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 163

… the breakdown of statism is inevitable … statism cannot work …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 386

The essence of the State through history is that a minority of the population, who constitute a “ruling class,” govern, live off of, and exploit the majority, or the “ruled.” Since a majority cannot live parasitically off a minority without the economy and the system breaking down very quickly, and since the majority can never act permanently by itself but must always be governed by an oligarchy, every State will persist by plundering the majority on behalf of a ruling minority. A further or corollary reason for the inevitability of minority rule is the pervasive fact of the division of labor; the majority of the public must spend most of its time about the business of making a daily living. Hence the actual rule of the State must be left to full-time professionals who are necessarily a minority of the society.

Throughout history, then, the State has consisted of a minority plundering and tyrannizing over a majority.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, pp. 520–21

… the State is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (a) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (b) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 535

… no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the State’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 536

… the State provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax-theft, and the coerced monopoly of “protection.”

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 539

… statism, in addition to its gross immorality, doesn’t work …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 573

… the State has always been the major aggressor … all States are evil …

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 639

… the State is the enemy of mankind.… the State, any State, is a predatory gang of criminals.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 773

For if the very being of an organization—the State—rests on organized theft, then this makes the State simply an organization of thieves, a criminal institution. Unlike other robbers and criminals, the State, far from being scorned and reviled as are most other marauders, is admired and even worshipped as “sovereign.” The State is the only socially legitimate organization of criminals.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1178

… the State—produces nothing; it acts as a parasitic blight upon the first, productive nation: taxing, looting, inflating, controlling, propagandizing, murdering.

Making Economic Sense, p. 407

… the State is the only organization in society legally equipped to use violence …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 877

Since all State actions rest on the fundamental binary intervention of taxation, it follows that no State action can increase social utility, i.e., can increase the utility of all affected individuals.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 881–82

… since the State is what we have now, any experimentation with a stateless society would have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1055

… the State is uniquely the agency engaged in regularized violence on a large scale.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1057

… the State has no incentive or means for efficient allocation …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1207

… the State must separate society into two classes, or castes: the taxpaying caste and the tax-consuming caste.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1221

… the State cannot be described as a business, engaged in selling services on the market … it is ludicrous to equate it to a charitable organization. Government is the very negation of charity.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1228

… the State is always inefficient …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1319

… the “middle-of-the-road” statist, who concedes the evil of violence but adds that the violence of government is sometimes necessary to counteract the “private coercion of economic power,” is caught in an impossible contradiction.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1327

State power is the power of man over man—the wielding of coercive violence by one group over another.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1331

The State and society are by no means coextensive.… the State is an antisocial instrument …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1336

… the State is a compulsory monopoly in which payment is separated from receipt of service. As long as this condition exists, there can indeed be no market “measure” of its marginal productivity.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 1353

STATISTICS

… statistics are desperately needed for any sort of government planning of the economic system. In a free market economy, the individual business firm has little or no need of statistics. It need only know its prices and costs. Costs are largely discovered internally within the firm and are not the general data of the economy which we usually refer to as “statistics.” The “automatic” market, then, requires virtually no gathering of statistics; government intervention, on the other hand, whether piecemeal or fully socialist, could do literally nothing without extensive ingathering of masses of statistics. Statistics are the bureaucrat’s only form of economic knowledge, replacing the intuitive, “qualitative” knowledge of the entrepreneur, guided only by the quantitative profit-and-loss test. Accordingly, the drive for government intervention, and the drive for more statistics, have gone hand in hand.

Economic Controversies, pp. 337–38

… a leading cause of the proliferation of governmental statistics is the need for statistical data in government economic planning. But the relationship works also in reverse: the growth of statistics, often developed originally for its own sake, ends by multiplying the avenues of government intervention and planning. In short, statistics do not have to be developed originally for politico-economic ends; their own autonomous development, directly or indirectly, opens up new fields for interventionists to exploit. …

… the statistically-oriented will tend to become interventionists.

Economic Controversies, pp. 342–43

… the great bulk of statistics is gathered by government coercion. This not only means that they are products of unwelcome activities; it also means that the true cost of these statistics to the American public is much greater than the mere amount of tax money spent by the government agencies. Private industry, and the private consumer, must bear the burdensome costs of record-keeping, filing, and the like, that these statistics demand. Not only that; these fixed costs impose a relatively great burden on small business firms, which are ill-equipped to handle the mountains of red tape. Hence, these seemingly innocent statistics cripple small business enterprise and help to rigidify the American business system.

Economic Controversies, p. 428

… statistics are, in a crucial sense, critical to all interventionist and socialist activities of government. …

… statistics are the eyes and ears of the bureaucrat, the politician, the socialistic reformer.

Economic Controversies, p. 429

… the absence of statistics would absolutely and immediately wreck any attempt at socialistic planning. …

… in all the host of measures that have been proposed over the years to check and limit government or to repeal its interventions, the simple and unspectacular abolition of government statistics would probably be the most thorough and most effective. Statistics, so vital to statism, its namesake, is also the State’s Achilles’s heel.

Economic Controversies, p. 421

… in contrast to the replicable quantitative findings of natural science, statistics of human action are mere listings of particular, non-replicable events, rather than the embodiment of enduring natural law.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 481

… statistics cannot refute logic …

Making Economic Sense, p. 9

… we never know all the data …

Making Economic Sense, p. 29

The normal curve is a symmetrical, bell-shaped curve familiar to all statistics textbooks.

Making Economic Sense, p. 31

The aggressively “scientific” statistician has become our purported faith-healer, our evangelical Witch Doctor, who has come to restore our faith in that monster Idol; the State.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 5

… I am an open and long-time condemner of the overuse of statistics, and I deplore as much as anyone the new trend in “scientific” economic history to hurl vast quantities of processed statistics at the reader, and conclude that one has captured the “feel” and essence of the past. But some statistics, surely, are necessary …

Strictly Confidential, p. 87

STRATEGY

It is absurd to try to reach the stateless society via the absolute maximization of state power in a totalitarian dictatorship.… The result can only be maximum statism and hence maximum slavery.

Classical Economics, p. 334

… appealing to a monarch to impose laissez-faire from above can only be a losing strategy.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 267

It is fatal, however, to abandon and lose sight of one’s own principles in the quest for allies in specific tactical actions.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 199

… the libertarian goal must be sought in the spirit of an overriding devotion to justice.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 258

The goal of immediate liberty is not unrealistic or “Utopian” because—in contrast to such goals as the “elimination of poverty”—its achievement is entirely dependent on man’s will. If, for example, everyone suddenly and immediately agreed on the overriding desirability of liberty, then total liberty would be immediately achieved.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 259

Gradualism in theory, in fact, totally undercuts the overriding goal of liberty itself …

Ethics of Liberty, p. 260

… a strategy for liberty must not include any means which undercut or contradict the end itself … Are we then saying that “the end justifies the means”? This is a common, but totally fallacious, charge often directed toward any group that advocates fundamental or radical social change. For what else but an end could possibly justify any means?

Ethics of Liberty, p. 261

… the libertarian goal, the victory of liberty, justifies the speediest possible means toward reaching the goal, but those means cannot be such as to contradict, and thereby undercut, the goal itself.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 261

The libertarian must use his strategic intelligence and knowledge of the issues of the day to set his priorities of political importance.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 263

… the means taken must never contradict the goal—whether by advocating gradualism, by employing or advocating any aggression against liberty, by advocating planned programs, or by failing to seize any opportunity to reduce State power or by ever increasing it in any area.

Ethics of Liberty, p. 264

… to prefer a gradual whittling away to immediate abolition of an evil and coercive institution is to ratify and sanction such evil, and therefore to violate libertarian principles.

For a New Liberty, p. 18

… the libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles.

For a New Liberty, p. 379

… To really pursue the goal of liberty, the libertarian must desire it attained by the most effective and speediest means available. …

The libertarian, then, should be a person who would push the button, if it existed, for the instantaneous abolition of all invasions of liberty.

For a New Liberty, p. 379

… the ultimate end of liberty be always held aloft as the desired goal … no steps or means ever explicitly or implicitly contradict the ultimate goal. A short-run demand may not go as far as we would like, but it should always be consistent with the final end; if not, the short-run goal will work against the long-run purpose, and opportunistic liquidation of libertarian principle will have arrived.

For a New Liberty, p. 383

… the libertarian must never allow himself to be trapped into any sort of proposal for “positive” governmental action; in his perspective, the role of government should only be to remove itself from all spheres of society just as rapidly as it can be pressured to do so.

For a New Liberty, p. 386

… the proper course for the right-wing opposition must necessarily be a strategy of boldness and confrontation, of dynamism and excitement, a strategy; in short, of rousing the masses from their slumber and exposing the arrogant elites that are ruling them, controlling them, taxing them, and ripping them off.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 10

Any libertarian strategy must recognize that intellectuals and opinion-molders are part of the fundamental problem, not just because of error, but because their own self-interest is tied into the ruling system.

Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 39

Liberty cannot be fully achieved unless libertarians exist in numbers to guide the people to the proper path.… The liberals of the past have left to modern libertarians a glorious heritage, not only of ideology but of victories against far more devastating odds. The liberals of the past have also left a heritage of the proper strategy and tactics for libertarians to follow: Not only by leading rather than remaining aloof from the masses; but also by not falling prey to short-run optimism. For short-run optimism, being unrealistic, leads straightway to disillusion and then to long-run pessimism; just as, on the other side of the coin, long-run pessimism leads to exclusive and self-defeating concentration on immediate and short-run issues. Short-run optimism stems, for one thing, from a naïve and simplistic view of strategy: that liberty will win merely by educating more intellectuals, who in turn will educate opinion-molders, who in turn will convince the masses, after which the State will somehow fold its tent and silently steal away. Matters are not that easy; for libertarians face not only a problem of education but also a problem of power; and it is a law of history that a ruling caste has never voluntarily given up its power.

Left and Right, p. 25

… the division of labor is just as important and as valid in revolution [as] in any other sphere of activity.… Let us do what we can do best, which is to spread the message and the actions of freedom, and of radical defense of property rights, to the middle-class masses who are potentially our allies and supporters. If we do so, then we won’t have to worry about who will win out in the final result.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 66

… the nub and the heart of libertarian strategy must be ideas and scholarship …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 375

… what any ideological group or movement needs is rigidity in principle, but flexibility in tactics.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 447

To achieve ultimate libertarian victory, it will undoubtedly become necessary for Libertarians to attain political office …

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 475

… you cannot roll back or whittle away statism—whether it be the government’s inflation, its budget, or its numerous depredations and controls on the economy—by getting a few “good guys” in there to speak Truth to Mr. President.… In the case of the State, the only thing that will roll back State power in any and all areas is the growth of a mass movement from below, i.e., among the public outside of and subjected to State power. Only a mass movement from below and outside: either by individual or organized actions, by ad hoc organizations, or by a Libertarian Party, or by all together, can hope to exert the pressure necessary to roll back the State.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 510

… the State benefits from exploiting the citizenry, and is not about to cheerfully or shamefacedly surrender those benefits upon reading libertarian literature.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 658

… the State must be diminished as fast and as completely as possible. Period.

And that is why the radical libertarian is not only an abolitionist, but also refuses to think in such terms as a Four Year Plan for some sort of stately and measured procedure for reducing the State.… The radical cannot think in such terms, because the radical regards the State as our mortal enemy, which must be hacked away at wherever and whenever we can. To the radical libertarian, we must take any and every opportunity to chop away at the State, whether it’s to reduce or abolish a tax, a budget appropriation, or a regulatory power.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 780

A genuine libertarian stance, like our platform, must be abolitionist; that is, we must not ourselves embrace gradualism as in some way better than an immediate achievement of the libertarian goal.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 950

… I do not believe for a minute that political action is immoral for a libertarian or an anarchist …

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1090

… gradual reform provides a convenient excuse to the vested interests, monopolists, and inefficient sluggards who are the beneficiaries of socialism, to change nothing at all.

Making Economic Sense, p. 423

… the only worthwhile analysis of the contemporary political and economic scene rests consistently on firm scholarly principles.

Making Economic Sense, p. 458

No science, no discipline, develops in thin air, in the abstract; it must be nurtured and advanced by people, by individual men and women who talk to each other, write to and for each other, interact and help build the body of Austrian economics and the people who sustain it.

Making Economic Sense, p. 461

Our objective is, of course, to advance our principles—to spread libertarian-individualist thought (from now on to be called “libertarian” for short) among the people and to spread its policies in the political arena. This is our objective, which must never be lost sight of. We must, then, always aim toward the advancement of libertarian thought, both in its creative development, and its spread among the intellectuals and eventually the “masses.” This is the ultimate essence of our aim …

Strictly Confidential, p. 9

To be inconsistent in the name of “practicality” is to betray the libertarian position itself, and is worthy of the utmost condemnation.

Strictly Confidential, p. 10

… the long run and the short run must be basically in harmony; strategy and tactics must be in harmony for any sort of coherent policy to emerge.

Strictly Confidential, p. 358

SUBJECTIVISM

Subjectivism stems from the important point that individuals value only subjectively: that goods and resources are evaluated by individual minds, for example, by consumers, and that prices of goods and services are determined only by relative valuations of those goods by all individuals in the market.

Economic Controversies, p. 171

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

… market demand curves are constituted by a spectrum of supramarginal, marginal, and submarginal buyers …

Classical Economics, p. 122

… the supply relevant to the real, day-to-day market price is a previously produced stock of a good now fixed for the immediate present period (in short, what would now be called a vertical supply curve for the immediate market period).

Classical Economics, p. 123

… in the real world, all prices are determined by the interaction of supply and demand. For individual prices, this means consumer valuations and consumer demands for a given stock: supply and demand in the real world. This is “short-run” micro-analysis.

Classical Economics, p. 167

… the real world of markets is not perfectly, but still harmoniously and dynamically coordinated by two crucial elements: a price system that is free to fluctuate to equate the changing forces of supply and demand; and entrepreneurs who, in their continuing search for increased profits and avoidance of losses, perform this coordinating task.

Classical Economics, p. 432

The market supply curve, therefore, should be vertical in the usual supply-demand diagram. The standard Marshallian forward-sloping supply curve illegitimately incorporates a time dimension within it …

Economic Controversies, p. 529

The genuine demand schedule is hypothetical, subjective, and instantaneous: all it says is that at a given moment, at price x, consumers would purchase a certain quantity y of the product. And the point of this schedule is precisely that we don’t know and can’t know this subjective relation, that there is no way to find out, and that the only point of the demand schedule is to show that, at any given time, the demand curve is “falling,” that is, as the price falls the quantity demanded increases, and vice versa. Properly, the law is qualitative and never quantitative, and there is never any way to establish such quantities.

Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, p. 311

… the free market never suffers from a shortage, as supply always rises to meet demand.

Libertarian Forum v. 1, p. 546

… equilibrium price is the price at which the good will tend to be set and sales to be made.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 116

The specific feature of the “clearing of the market” performed by the equilibrium price is that, at this price alone, all those buyers and sellers who are willing to make exchanges can do so.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 117

The result of the market process is always to tend toward the establishment of the equilibrium price via the mutual bidding of buyers and sellers. …

Once the market price is established, it is clear that one price must rule over the entire market. This has already been implied by the fact that all buyers and sellers will tend to exchange at the same price as their marginal competitors. There will always be a tendency on the market to establish one and only one price at any time for a good.… drives for arbitrage gains (buying and selling to take advantage of discrepancies in the price of a good) act quickly to establish one price for one good over the entire market. Such market prices will tend to change only when changing supply and demand conditions alter the equilibrium price and establish a condition of excess supply or excess demand where before the market had been cleared.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 119

… the demand curve must always be vertical or rightward-sloping as the price decreases, while the supply curve must always be vertical or leftward-sloping as the price decreases. The curves will intersect at the equilibrium price, where supply and demand are equal.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 120

One price will tend to be established for each good on the market, and that price will tend to be the equilibrium price, determined by the intersection of the market supply and demand schedules.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 125

The market is always tending quickly toward its equilibrium position, and the wider the market is, and the better the communication among its participants, the more quickly will this position be established for any set of schedules.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 143

… the fact that men seek their greatest utility sets forces into motion that establish the money price at a certain equilibrium point …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 247

What the equilibrium price will be depends upon the configuration of the supply and demand schedules …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 247

For all goods, the establishment of the equilibrium price tends to establish a state of rest, a cessation of exchanges. After the price is established, sales will take place until the stock is in the hands of the most capable possessors …

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 255

The sellers who are included in the sale at the equilibrium price are those whose value scales make them the most capable, the most eager, sellers. Similarly, it will be the most capable, or most eager, buyers who will purchase the good at the equilibrium price.… Those who are excluded from sale or purchase by their own value scales are the “less capable,” or “less eager,” buyers and sellers.… Under the law of price uniformity, all the exchanges are made at the equilibrium price (once it is established), i.e., between the valuations of the marginal buyer and those of the marginal seller, with the demand and supply schedules and their intersection determining the point of the margin. It is clear from the nature of human action that all buyers will benefit (or decide they will benefit) from the exchange. Those who abstain from buying the good have decided that they would lose from the exchange. These propositions hold true for all goods.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, p. 257

If two prices for one good exist, people will tend to rush to purchase in the cheaper market and sell more of the good in the more expensive market, until the play of supply and demand on each market establishes an “equilibrium” price and eliminates the arbitrage opportunity.

Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, pp. 290–91

… any given price is always determined by two fundamental, underlying forces: supply and demand, or the supply of that product and the intensity of demand to purchase it.

Mystery of Banking, p. 15

… all other things remaining the same, the higher the price of a product the less will be purchased. Conversely, the lower the price the more will be purchased.

Mystery of Banking, p. 16

The lower the price of any product (other things being equal), the greater the quantities that buyers will be willing to purchase. And vice versa.

Mystery of Banking, pp. 17–18

… price responds inversely to supply. If supply increases, price will fall; if supply falls, price will rise.

Mystery of Banking, p. 24

… price responds directly to changes in demand. If demand increases, price rises; if demand falls, the price drops.

Mystery of Banking, p. 26

…on the free market a rise in the demand for and price of one product will necessarily be counterbalanced by a fall in the demand for another.

Mystery of Banking, p. 27

SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS

… one wonders why the overriding goal of fiscal policy should be to maximize government revenue. A far sounder objective would be to minimize the revenue and the resources siphoned off to the public sector.

America’s Great Depression, p. xix

The supply-siders are interventionists and not free-market advocates; they simply want different kinds of intervention.

Libertarian Forum v. 2, p. 1002

… Laffer assumes that what all of us want is to maximize tax revenue to the government.… I should think we would be more interested in minimizing government revenue by pushing tax rates far, far below whatever the Laffer Optimum might happen to be.

Making Economic Sense, pp. 17–18

A central theme of the supply-side school is that a sharp cut in marginal income-tax rates will increase incentives to work and save, and therefore investment and production. That way, few people could take exception. But there are other problems involved. …

… the supply-siders want to maintain the current swollen levels of federal spending.

Making Economic Sense, p. 41