The State is a gang of thieves writ large - the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.
Murray RothbardI see a great future for gold and silver coins as the currency people may increasingly turn to when paper currencies begin to disintegrate.
Murray RothbardGold was not selected arbitrarily by governments to be the monetary standard. Gold had developed for many centuries on the free market as the best money; as the commodity providing the most stable and desirable monetary medium.
Murray RothbardIn fact, the libertarian would reason that the fact that human nature is a mixture of both good and evil provides its own particular argument in his favor. For if man is such a mixture, then the best societal framework is surely one in which evil is discouraged and the good encouraged. The libertarian maintains that the existence of the State apparatus provides a ready, swift channel for the exercise of evil, since the rulers of the State are thereby legitimated and can wield compulsion in ways that no one else is permitted to do.
Murray RothbardThe great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.
Murray RothbardWe must, therefore, emphasize that 'we' are not the government; the government is not 'us.' The government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people. But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority. No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that 'we are all part of one another,' must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.
Murray Rothbard