"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."
Thomas Jefferson

"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money."
David Crockett, U.S. Congressman (1827-1835)

"The fact is that government, like a highwayman, says to a man:  'Your money or your life.'"
Lysander Spooner

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
Thomas Sowell

"The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty."
Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, dissenting in Knox vs. Lee

"The arguments in favor of the constitutionality of legal tender paper currency tend directly to break down the barriers which separate a government of limited powers from a government resting in the unrestrained will of Congress. Those limitations must be preserved, or our government will inevitably drift from the system established by our Fathers into a vast, centralized, and consolidated government."
Justice Stephen Field

"Repeal of legal tender laws will help restore constitutional government and protect the people's right to a medium of exchange chosen by the market, thereby protecting their current purchasing power as well as their pensions, savings, and other promises of future payment. Because honest money serves the needs of ordinary people, instead of fiat irredeemable paper-ticket electronic money that improperly transfers the wealth of society to a small specially privileged financial elite along with other special interests, I urge my colleagues to cosponsor the Honest Money Act."
Congressman Ron Paul

"The means to social peace and prosperity is a free market, a sound currency, and the elimination of government power to destroy people's lives."
Lew Rockwell

"The U.S. government has no business telling the American people what they may and may not buy from people living outside the country.  That's called freedom, something earlier Americans actually understood and valued."
Sheldon Richman, a scholar at the Future of Freedom Foundation,

"[The federal tax code is a confusing conglomeration that] 'at best is a walking due process violation.'"
Larry Becraft, Huntville, AL lawyer defending Vernice Kuglin against tax evasion charges levied by the IRS

"The question is: Will [gold] ever again become money? This is the most important of all monetary questions."
Gary North

"Nothing is permanent except death, taxes, and the lies of politicians, but in the West, the de-monetization of gold appears to be as permanent as the West. The West has bet its future on fractional reserve banking. This is additional evidence that the West is doomed. It has placed the extension of the division of labor into the hands of the bankers' cartel."
Gary North

"It was the abandonment of the gold standard that made modern barbarism affordable."
Gary North

"There's no such thing as "sustainable" development. Human progress and individual liberty have advanced on the backs of one unsustainable development after another: When we needed trees for heating and transportation, we chopped 'em down. Then we discovered oil, and the trees grew back. When the oil runs out, we won't notice because our SUVs will be powered by something else. Bet on human ingenuity every time. We're not animals, and it's a cult as deranged as the screwiest fringe religion to insist we are. Earth's most valuable resource is us."
Mark Steyn

"Let there be no doubt: the business cycle, the stagflation, the recessions, the depressions, and the inflations are not a result of capitalism and sound money, but rather are a direct result of paper money and a central bank that is incapable of managing it."
Congressman Ron Paul, Texas

"Real economic growth won't return until confidence in the entire system is restored. And that is impossible as long as it depends on the politicians not spending too much money and the Federal Reserve limiting its propensity to inflate our way to prosperity. Only sound money and limited government can do that."
Congressman Ron Paul, Texas

"No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; its only use is to make them take bad money."
Stephen T. Byington, 1895

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest."
Adam Smith

"When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will."
Fredrick Bastiat

"No better weapon against poverty, disease, illiteracy, and tyranny has yet been found . . . Capitalism's compassion for the material needs of humankind has not in history, yet, had a peer."
Michael Novak

"Once the right to tax is conceded to an institution said to possess a monopoly on the use of force, no feeble constitution can stand in the way of its expansion."
Thomas Woods, Jr, commenting on wisdom from Hans Herman Hoppe.

"The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and raison d'être to political anarchy."
Jean Baechler

"Thus, again, economics is properly a value-free science that shows us how our ends can be reached. It doesn't contain all the answers of life, nor does it claim to. It does, however, show how the morally acceptable desire for profit leads to spontaneous social cooperation that obviates the need for a bloated state apparatus to direct production. It shows us the fascinating mechanisms by which peaceful social cooperation leads to overall prosperity."
Thomas Woods, Jr

"It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from starvation.... the fact remains that for the surplus population which the enclosure movement had reduced to dire wretchedness and for which there was literally no room left in the frame of the prevailing system of production, work in the factories was salvation. These people thronged into the plants for no reason other than the urge to improve their standard of living."
Ludwig von Mises

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."
Fredrick Bastiat

"Human or individual rights, such as the rights to life, liberty and property, are derived from man's innate moral agency and capacity for reason."
Ilana Mercer, 2003

"Where there is no market there is no price system, and where there is no price system there can be no economic calculation."
Ludwig Von Mises, Socialism

The problem of socialist economic calculation is precisely this: that in the absence of market prices for the factors of production, a computation of profit or loss is not feasible.
Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action

The overwhelmingly rapid triumph of the demonstration that no economic calculation is possible under a socialist system is without precedent indeed in the history of human thought. The socialists cannot help admitting their crushing final defeat. They no longer claim that socialism is matchlessly superior to capitalism because it brushes away markets, market prices, and competition. On the contrary. They are now eager to justify socialism by pointing out that it is possible to preserve these institutions even under socialism. They are drafting outlines for a socialism in which there are prices and competition.
Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action

"Life, faculties, production - in other words, individuality, liberty, property - this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

"Let people alone, and they will take care of themselves, and do it best; and if they do not, a sufficient punishment will follow their neglect, without the magistrate's interposition and penalties..."
Cato

"Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy."
Winston Churchill, 1948

"Theft is still theft even when the government approves of the thievery."
Janice Rogers Brown

"The right to express one's individuality and essential human dignity through the free use of property is just as important as the right to do so through speech, the press, or the free exercise of religion."
Janice Rogers Brown

"The Fed Causes Misallocation of Capital entrepreneurs need to estimate the likely success of their undertakings, and for that they rely on economic calculation and the market price system."
George F. Smith, The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, Vol 2, No 39, October 6, 2003

"On the unhampered market, the interest rate becomes a reliable signal to business people that authentic savings are available for capital goods investment."
George F. Smith, The Laissez Faire Electronic Times, Vol 2, No 39, October 6, 2003

"I'm for a flat tax -- as long as the flat rate is zero. The object is to get rid of big government, not find a new way of financing it."
Harry Browne

"These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions...our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people."
Ronald Reagan

"Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, causing human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.”
Ronald Reagan

"For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals."
Ronald Reagan

"Would-be planners are busily foisting tyranny and poverty on people in pursuit of plans which cannot succeed."
Murray Rothbard

"It's become a matter of survival for business to pay tributes to politicians in return for protection against harmful edicts and legislation."
George Smith

"Whenever government intervenes in the market, it aggravates rather than settles the problems it has set out to solve."
Murray Rothbard

"When something cannot go on, it has a tendency to stop."
Herb Stein, chairman of Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
Thomas Sowell

"Even now politicians use the phrase "federal dollars" as a synonym for "free money."  It's a dangerous tendency, for it leaves the states accountable to Washington rather than to their own voters.  This mix of state and federal governments is not just economically suspect but politically corrosive; it undermines the essence of real federalism: the integrity of both state and federal governments."
Paul Greenberg

"Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry."
Thomas Paine

"Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion."
Murray Rothbard

"Though my heart may be left of centre, I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy... it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself."
Vaclax Havel, Summer Meditations


"A tax, in the general understanding of the term, and as used in the Constitution, signifies an exaction for the support of the Government. The word has never been thought to connote the expropriation of money from one group for the benefit of another."
Justice Owen Roberts

"How much longer will the rest of the world be willing to accept debt instruments from the United States in exchange for real goods and services? It is only a matter of time before the United States will no longer be considered creditworthy. It is only a matter of time before the United States will not be creditworthy."
Richard Duncan

"Because we live and work ensnared in a seamless web of statism, market solutions are often circuitous responses to the government's laws and wars. These statist assaults on our prosperity ought to be the proper focus of the fight."
Ilana Mercer

"The evils produced by the system of paper money and moneyed corporations are of such a nature that they cannot be remedied by acts of legislation. When they come they must be endured. If we will have the system, we must bear its consequences."
William M. Gouge, Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States (1833).

"In July 1832, when President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill to extend the charter for the Bank of the United States another 20 years, Biddle sought to contract the economy to deny him reelection in the fall. When that failed and Jackson was reelected, Biddle continued to constrict credit for another two years in order to destroy Jackson's popularity and coerce a re-charter."
H.A. Scott Trask, writing for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Dec 19, 2003, demonstrating the political tactics available to central bankers

"When you wake up in the morning and drink that first cup of coffee, you pay a sales tax.  When you start your car, you pay an automobile tax.  Drive to work, you pay a gas tax.  At work, you pay an income tax -- and a payroll tax.  You get home at night, and you pay a property tax.  Flip on the light -- you're paying an electricity tax.  Turn on the TV -- you pay a cable tax. Make a telephone call, you pay a utility tax.  Brush your teeth, you'll pay a water tax.  Even when you die, you pay a death tax.  We are an overtaxed nation and hard-working Americans deserve a break."
Sen. Trent Lott

"We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure...."
Ronald Reagan (1964)

"The class war tactic highlights what the Left does best: divide Americans into groups.  Collectivists see all issues of wealth and taxation as a zero-sum game played between competing groups.  If one group gets a tax break, other groups must be rallied against it -- even if such a cut would ultimately benefit them. Yet the class warriors forget that American wealth is not static, but rather very dynamic.  Poor people become rich, and rich people lose all of their money.  In fact, at no time in American history have more of the nation's wealthy earned rather than inherited their money.  Rich family dynasties are increasingly rare, and are quickly destroyed by unproductive spendthrift generations.  So when the Left attacks the rich, they're attacking a fluid group that many poor Americans hope to join someday by moving up in life. Upward mobility is possible only in a free-market capitalist system, whereas collectivism dooms the poor to remain exactly where they are.  I'm in favor of cutting everybody's taxes -- rich, poor, and otherwise.  Whether a tax cut reduces a single mother's payroll taxes by forty dollars a month, or allows a wealthy business owner to save millions in capital gains, the net effect is beneficial.  Both either spend, save, or invest the extra dollars, which helps all of us infinitely more than if those dollars were sent to the black hole known as the federal Treasury.  The single mother desperately needs those extra dollars, and that's why we should reduce or eliminate her payroll taxes.  As for the wealthy business owner and whether he 'needs' the extra dollars, I'll simply relate the old adage of the man who said 'I've never had my paycheck signed by a poor man'."
Ron Paul

“Our country has been behaving like an extraordinarily rich family that possesses an immense farm. In order to consume 4% more than we produce - that's the trade deficit - we have, day by day, been both selling pieces of the farm and increasing the mortgage on what we still own.”
Warren Buffet

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