Llewellyn Rockwell Quotes

It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles. H.L. Mencken once said that the state doesn't just want to make you obey. It tries to make you want to obey. And that's one thing the government schools do very well.

Capitalism, and capitalism alone, has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness and early death.

If credit expansion, protectionism, and government spending were a path to prosperity, mankind would have long ago created heaven on earth.

Democracy has turned out to be not majority rule but rule by well-organized and well-connected minority groups who steal from the majority.

Socialism crushes human rights, builds the state, impinges on the liberty of conscience, and breeds social, cultural, and economic degeneration.

Never forget that no government has wealth of its own to spend. The money has to come from taxation, monetary inflation, or debt expansion that must be paid later. And government's spending choices will always be uneconomic relative to how society would use that wealth. That is to say, the money will be wasted.

Even as the government dominates the headlines, private entrepreneurs are busy every day working to improve products and services that improve our lives. They do it without taxing us or regulating us, or making us suffer through tedious elections or political debates. They make their products and offer them to us in a way that pleases the consuming public the most. We can choose whether we want them or not.

Now, it is sometimes said that medical care is too important to be left to the market, and that it is immoral to profit from the illnesses of others. I say medical care is too important to be left to the failed central plans of the political class. And as for profiting from providing medical care, we can never be reminded enough that in a free society, a profit is a signal that valuable services are being rendered to people on a voluntary basis.

The most encouraging trend of our time is the widespread loss of faith in government. No longer do people look to the government as the great problem solver, economic planner, social unifier, or cultural czar. The government is more likely to be seen for what it is, a haven for grafters, liars, and would-be tyrants. Americans, like the Russians, no longer believe anything until it is officially denied.

One ironic legacy of the Clinton administration is the rearming of the American citizenry. Each time Clinton and his friends in Congress threaten another round of anti-gun regulations, the American people respond by stocking up.

There is nothing the state can do, and which society needs done, that cannot be done far better by the market.

Socialized medicine must fail for the same reasons all socialism must fail: it offers no system for rationally allocating resources, and instead promotes the overutilization of all resources, ending in bankruptcy.

It's not as if socialism is a new idea. It was tried in the 20th century. It produced economic stagnation and despair. In its purest form, it extinguished more than one hundred million people.

The state always poses a greater threat to society than whatever problem it purports to solve.

Pledge allegiance to your principles, your family, your faith, but don't be foolish enough to pledge allegiance to a gang of thieves.

Americans are coming to their senses, and the libertarian theory of society and government is pointing the way. The times change, but the enduring principles that help us to interpret and understand the world do not. It remains true now, as then, as in the future, saecula saeculorum, that government provides neither an effective nor a moral means for solving any human problem.

Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals.

We like to imagine that in history, truth will prevail through sheer persuasive power. Sadly, this is not the case. Truth needs champions.

American federalism was the embodiment of political tolerance and decentralization - the expression of the liberal conviction that society can manage itself and needs no central plan.

Libertarianism is a theory of politics that is so compelling that once you have absorbed it, it becomes the lens through which you end up understanding all economic and political events.

The danger to a free society is not the guns owned by the citizens but an unconstrained government.... An armed society is a self-governing society, just as a disarmed people are vulnerable to arbitrary power of every kind.

In education, it is said that the state must impose schooling on all children, else the parents and communities will neglect it. Only the state can make sure that no child is left behind. The only question is the means: will we use the union and bureaucracies favored by the left, or the market incentives and vouchers favored by the right. I don't want to get into a debate about which means is better, but only to draw attention to the reality that these are both forms of planning that compromise the freedom of families to manage their own affairs.

Always and everywhere, the only serious political issue is what the state should and should not do. All the rest distracts.

Never underestimate the power of bad ideas. They must be refuted again and again.

The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government's involvement at all.

The state is and has been in history a source of disorder and chaos, and this problem gets worse the more the state grows.

The laws of economics tell us that the expansion of the central state can't go on forever. Its limit is reached when the looted turn on the looters.

Wealth is not a given or an accident of history. It is not bestowed on us like rain from above. It is the product of human creativity in an environment of freedom. The freedom to own, to make contracts, to save, to invest, to associate, and to trade: these are the key to prosperity.

To concede that there are social problems that cannot be corrected without the state is to give up the entire argument over the future of liberty itself.

Private enterprise creates; government destroys. That is the great economic lesson of our times and all times.

The fact is that the New Deal did not work. It prolonged what might have been a troubling two-year downturn into a horrifying blow to world prosperity that ended up in a war that killed countless millions. It was one of the greatest acts of wreckage in world history.

What makes for the good society is a sound economy. Without it, all the rest falls apart.

Prosperity is an essential partner in civilization itself. It is the basis of leisure, charity, and a hopeful outlook on life. It is the means for conquering poverty at the lowest rung of society, the basis on which children and the elderly are cared for, the foundation for the cultivation of arts and learning. Crush an economy and you crush civilization.

Welcome to the age of paper money, where governments and central banks can manufacture as much money as they want without limit. Gold was the last limit. Its banishment as a standard unleashed the inflation monster and leviathan itself, which has swelled beyond comprehension.

Profit is a signal that valuable services are being rendered to people on a voluntary basis.

What the American worker needs is more of what WalMart offers and less of what the government offers.

The leviathan state, that monster devouring civilization in this century, is in the throes of death. This is not a wish or a prediction, but a conclusion drawn from a broad look at the trends of the last decade and a half, which, if we take the right steps, can continue on into the next century. What has happened around the world - nations states collapsing, markets outwitting planners, citizens rising up against government masters - can and is happening here at home.

The laws of economics tell us that the expansion of the central state can't go on forever. Its limit is reached when the looted turn on the looters. And that's beginning to happen. More than six decades of hard work for American liberty beginning with the Old Right opposition to the Roosevelt Revolution and continuing with the Mises Institute, is beginning to bear fruit.

It is not caving in to the bees to stop poking a stick into their hive.

The state is a vast enterprise for declaring all sorts of things legal for itself that would be illegal for us.

What we need is a new consciousness concerning the idea of human liberty.

If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning.

The larger the government, the more our livings standards are reduced. We are fortunate as a civilization that the progress of free enterprise generally outpaces the regress of government growth, for, if that were not the case, we would be poorer each year - not just in relative terms, but absolutely poorer too. The market is smart and the government is dumb, and to these attributes do we owe the whole of our economic well-being.

Money out of nothing is money that is eventually worth nothing.

Government planning not only fails; it tends to produce outcomes that are the opposite of what its proponents say that they favor. The only stable and productive social system is one that embraces human liberty in its totality, and defends the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive.

Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized.

To centralize power in the name of freedom is akin to putting a crime syndicate in charge of rooting out corruption. It is the normal state of politics that the more centralized it is, the more damage it does. Fast-track authority [for government-to-government trade agreements] centralizes power and is therefore part of the problem.

Without market prices for capital goods, accounting is not possible. You don't know if you are making money or losing money, saving resources or wasting them, doing the right thing or not doing the right thing.

American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it's been a long steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole.

Repeal the entire Banking Act of 1933, and Austrian School economists will cheer, especially if the current system were replaced by a 100%-reserve competitive banking with no central bank. That banking reform would give us a sound money system, meaning no more business cycle, bailouts, or inflation.