If you spend your own money on yourself, you care how much you spend and how well you spend it. If you spend your own money on someone else, you care how much you spend, but you don't care how well it is spent. If you spend someone else's money on yourself, you don't care how much you spend, but you do care how well it is spent. And finally, if you spend someone else's money on someone else, you don't care how much you spend, and you don't care how well it is spent. That is government.

There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money - money tempted to inflate - put out by politically independent entities.

To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.