58 Quotes by Robert Higgs

Austria, Germany and the U.S. South did not disappear as a result of their currencies' ruin. Although many people suffered, most people found a way to survive, life went on, and economic activity eventually resumed after the adoption of a 'reformed' or foreign medium of exchange.

If you have a private firm and you spend a ton of money to pay employees, but what you produce is a flop, there will be no value to GDP. But government spending all gets counted as contributing to economic growth. That's why in the early days of creating these measurements, some people didn't want to count government spending.

It would take little more than $50 billion to raise every poor person above the official poverty line, yet the percentage of the population classified as poor hardly budges, while annual welfare spending amounts to four times that much. Where's the money going?

It is a sound interpretive rule...that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all.

All nonstate threats to life, liberty, and property appear to be relatively petty and therefore can be dealt with. Only states can pose truly massive threats, and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind invariably come to pass.

When American presidents prepare for foreign wars, they lie.

Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners’ obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models.

True counselors of despair are those who hope against hope—and historical experience—that the government can and will act constructively.

Abetted by misguided or co-opted intellectuals, the rulers weave a cloak of legitimacy to disguise their theft and hence to ease their extraction of wealth from the rightful owners.