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

Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say violence or the threat of violence against the innocent.

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

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.

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.

No state empowered to do what is supposedly necessary will restrain itself to those things. It will expand as much as public opinion will tolerate.

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