227 Quotes by murray rothbard

In a sense, the market, by expecting a fall in prices, discounts that fall and makes it happen right away instead of later. Expectations speed up future price reactions.

The expansionary operations of the Second Bank of the United States, coupled with its laxity toward insisting on specie payment by the state banks, impelled a further inflationary expansion of state banks on top of the spectacular enlargement of the central bank. Thus, the number of incorporated state banks rose from 232 in 1816 to 338 in 1818.

In the United States, after World War II, it took about two decades for the message to slowly seep in that inflation was going to be a permanent fact of the American way of life.

The threat of gold redeemability imposes a constant check and limit on inflationary issues of government paper. If the government can remove the threat, it can expand and inflate without cease. And so it begins to emit propaganda, trying to persuade the public not to use gold coins in their daily lives.

One grave and fundamental Keynesian error is to persist in regarding the interest rate as a contract rate on loans instead of the price spreads between stages of production. The former, as we have seen, is only the reflection of the latter.

The important desideratum is freedom of the market; a country or region will often best develop, depending on conditions of resources or the market, by concentrating on one or two items and then exchanging them for other items produced elsewhere.

What is so terrible about transaction costs? On what basis are they considered the ultimate evil, so that their minimization must override all other considerations of choice, freedom, and justice?

The successful entrepreneurs on the free market will be the ones most adept at anticipating future business conditions. Yet, the forecasting can never be perfect, and entrepreneurs will continue to differ in the success of their judgments. If this were not so, no profits or losses would ever be made in business.

Hoover had prevented 'an immediate attack upon wages as a basis of maintaining profits,' but the result of wiping out profits and maintaining artificial wage rates was chronic, unprecedented depression.