When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists. We are lucky, indeed, if the needless bureaucrats are mere easy-going loafers. They are more likely today to be energetic reformers busily discouraging and disrupting production.

For every alleged benefit that the politicians confer upon us, they must necessarily deprive us of something else.

Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the now practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is any problem of any kind to be solved, government is the agency to step in and solve it.

The more things a government undertakes to do, the fewer things it can do completely. When the government tries to do everything it must do everything badly.

Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.

Need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.

There is a profound contrast between the effects of foreign aid and of voluntary private investment: foreign aid goes from government to government. It is therefore almost inevitably statist and socialistic.