“For while libertarians have too often been opportunists who lose sight of or under-cut their ultimate goal, some have erred in the opposite direction: fearing and condemning any advances toward the idea as necessarily selling out the goal itself. The… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share
“The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life. Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share
“For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share Image
“It is not so evident why intellectuals need the State. Put simply, we may state that the intellectual’s livelihood in the free market is… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share Image
“Passports were originally created to provide safe conduct in time of war. During most of the eighteenth century it seldom occurred to Europeans to… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share Image
“Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it." In the law of torts, "harm" is generally treated as physical invasion of person or property. The outlawing of defamation (libel and slander) has always been… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share
“So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services that an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself. Thus if one maintains that the State should not supply court services, and that private enterprise on the market could supply such service more efficiently as well… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share
“The State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as “taxation,” although in less regularized epochs it was often known as “tribute.” Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share
“Dutt effectively concluded with a quote from an editor of the highly respected Current History Magazine: The new America [the editor had written in mid-1933] will not be capitalist in the old sense, nor will it be socialist. If at the moment the trend is towards fascism, it will be an American fascism, embodying the experience, the traditions, and the… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share
“Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”;… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share Image
“If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share Image
“In this century, the human race faces, once again, the virulent reign of the State—of the State now armed with the fruits of man’s creative powers, confiscated and perverted to its own aims. The last few centuries were times when men tried to place constitutional and other limits on the State, only to find that such limits, as with all… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share
“We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely—those against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its… — Murray N. Rothbard Copy Share
