The Case for the 100 Percent Gold Dollar by Murray N. Rothbard
May 23, 2005
"[W]e should keep in mind that money, in any market economy advanced beyond the stage of primitive barter, is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, the state is able to gain unquestioned control over the unit of all accounts, the state will then be in a position to dominate the entire economic system, and the whole society. It will also be able to add quietly and effectively to its own wealth and to the wealth of its favorite groups, and without incurring the wrath that taxes often invoke. The state has understood this lesson since the kings of old began repeatedly to debase the coinage."
Taking Money Back by Murray N. Rothbard
September, 1995
“ When the government is the counterfeiter, the counterfeiting process not only can be ‘detected’; it proclaims itself openly as monetary statesmanship for the public weal.”
The Economic Effects of Inflation by Murray N. Rothbard
Excerpt from What Has Government Done to Our Money?
“To gauge the economic effects of inflation, let us see what happens when a group of counterfeiters set about their work.”
Rothbard on Greenspan by Murray N. Rothbard
August, 1987
“Greenspan's real qualification is that he can be trusted never to rock the establishment's boat. He has long positioned himself in the very middle of the economic spectrum. He is, like most other long-time Republican economists, a conservative Keynesian, which in these days is almost indistinguishable from the liberal Keynesians in the Democratic camp. In fact, his views are virtually the same as Paul Volcker, also a conservative Keynesian. Which means that he wants moderate deficits and tax increases, and will loudly worry about inflation as he pours on increases in the money supply.”
Repudiating the National Debt by Murray N. Rothbard
June, 1992
“The public debt transaction, then, is very different from private debt. Instead of a low-time preference creditor exchanging money for an IOU from a high-time preference debtor, the government now receives money from creditors, both parties realizing that the money will be paid back not out of the pockets or the hides of the politicians and bureaucrats, but out of the looted wallets and purses of the hapless taxpayers, the subjects of the state. The government gets the money by tax-coercion; and the public creditors, far from being innocents, know full well that their proceeds will come out of that selfsame coercion. In short, public creditors are willing to hand over money to the government now in order to receive a share of tax loot in the future. This is the opposite of a free market, or a genuinely voluntary transaction.”
Review of Samuelson’s ‘Economics,’ 9th Edition by Murray N. Rothbard
December, 1973
“In his attempt to give more weight to the views of the free-market economists to his right, Samuelson falls into the egregious error of including Friedrich A. Hayek among "Chicago school libertarians" and then compounds and reverses the error by including Frank Knight in the "Austrian school" (a term he leaves unexplained). Clearly, if Samuelson had granted to the libertarians a fraction of the care he has given to distinguishing between various brands and offshoots of Marxism, he would have taken the time to distinguish between these two very different variants of free-market economics.”
Why the Business Cycle Happens by Murray N. Rothbard
1959
“Mises’ theory shows the complete workings of the boom-bust cycle: the inflationary injection of bank credit, fostered by government; a boom marked by malinvestments caused by inflation’s tampering with the signals of the free market; the end of inflation revealing these unfortunate malinvestments; and finally, the depression as the correction by the free market of the wastes and distortions of the boom. Ironically, the work where Mises first outlined his theory appeared about the same time [1912] as [Wesley] Mitchell’s.
“The classical, and now the Mises, theories have been generally scorned by modern writers, and mainly for this reason: that Mises locates the cause of business cycles in interference with the free market, while all other writers, following Mitchell, cherish the idea that business cycles come from deep within the capitalist system, that they are, in short, a sickness of the free market. The founder of this idea, by the way, was not Wesley Mitchell, but Karl Marx.”
Mercantilism: A Lesson for Our Times? by Murray N. Rothbard
December 11, 2008
“{I]n no way could [the mercantilists] be considered as ‘progressives’ or lovers of the common man; on the contrary, they were frank exponents of the Old Order of statism, hierarchy, landed oligarchy, and special privilege—that entire ‘Tory’ regime against which laissez-faire liberalism and classical economics leveled their liberating ‘revolution’ . . .”
Review of Lionel Robbins’ The Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard
November 14, 1959
“In this brief, clear, but extremely meaty book, Robbins sets forth first the Misesian theory of business cycles, and then applies it to the events of the 1920s and 1930s. We see how bank credit expansion in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries (in Britain generated because of the rigid wage structure caused by unions and the unemployment insurance system, as well as a return to the gold standard at too high a par; and in the United States generated by a desire to inflate in order to help Britain as well as an absurd devotion to the ideal of a stable price level) drove the civilized world into a great depression.
“Then Robbins shows how the various nations took measures to counteract and cushion the depression that could only make it worse: propping up unsound, shaky business positions; inflating credit; expanding public works; keeping up wage rates (e.g., Hoover and his White House conferences) — all things that prolonged the necessary depression adjustments, and profoundly aggravated the catastrophe. Robbins is particularly bitter about the wave of tariffs, exchange controls, quotas, etc. that prolonged crises, set nation against nation, and fragmented the international division of labor.”
Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy by Murray Rothbard
“American entry into World War I in April 1917 prevented negotiated peace between the warring powers, and drove the Allies forward into a peace of unconditional surrender and dismemberment, a peace which, as we have seen, set the stage for World War II. American entry thus cost countless lives on both sides, chaos and disruption throughout central and eastern Europe at war's end, and the consequent rise of Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism to power in Europe.
“ . . . American entry into the war [could] not have been financed by the relatively hard-money, gold standard system that existed before 1914. Fortuitously, an institution was established at the end of 1913 that made the loans and war finance possible: the Federal Reserve System.”
Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure by Murray Rothbard
First published in 1969
“Since [business cycles] appeared on the scene at about the same time as modern industry, Marx concluded that business cycles were an inherent feature of the capitalist market economy. All the various current schools of economic thought, regardless of their other differences and the different causes that they attribute to the cycle, agree on this vital point: That these business cycles originate somewhere deep within the free-market economy. The market economy is to blame.”
