No one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.
Murray RothbardAfter the Volcker Fund collapsed, I got another grant from the Lilly Endowment to do a history of the U.S., which I worked on from 1962-66. The original idea was to take the regular facts and put a libertarian assessment on everything.
Murray RothbardIf we look around, then, at the crucial problem areas of our society - the areas of crisis and failure - we find in each and every case a โred threadโ marking and uniting them all: the thread of government. In every one of these cases, government either has totally run or heavily influenced the activity.
Murray RothbardPlacing the state in charge of moral principles is equivalent to putting the proverbial fox in charge of the chicken coop.
Murray Rothbard