Llewellyn Rockwell Quotes

What we need is a new consciousness concerning the idea of human liberty.

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.

Americans are coming to their senses, and the libertarian theory of society and government is pointing the way. The times change, but the enduring principles that help us to interpret and understand the world do not. It remains true now, as then, as in the future, saecula saeculorum, that government provides neither an effective nor a moral means for solving any human problem.

Democracy has turned out to be not majority rule but rule by well-organized and well-connected minority groups who steal from the majority.

The most encouraging trend of our time is the widespread loss of faith in government. No longer do people look to the government as the great problem solver, economic planner, social unifier, or cultural czar. The government is more likely to be seen for what it is, a haven for grafters, liars, and would-be tyrants. Americans, like the Russians, no longer believe anything until it is officially denied.

Prosperity is an essential partner in civilization itself. It is the basis of leisure, charity, and a hopeful outlook on life. It is the means for conquering poverty at the lowest rung of society, the basis on which children and the elderly are cared for, the foundation for the cultivation of arts and learning. Crush an economy and you crush civilization.

What the American worker needs is more of what WalMart offers and less of what the government offers.

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

The state always poses a greater threat to society than whatever problem it purports to solve.

It's a hard truth for Americans to face, that neither team in Washington is going to guard what we love the most. That is something we are going to have to face. Liberty is for the citizens to guard themselves.

In education, it is said that the state must impose schooling on all children, else the parents and communities will neglect it. Only the state can make sure that no child is left behind. The only question is the means: will we use the union and bureaucracies favored by the left, or the market incentives and vouchers favored by the right. I don't want to get into a debate about which means is better, but only to draw attention to the reality that these are both forms of planning that compromise the freedom of families to manage their own affairs.

American federalism was the embodiment of political tolerance and decentralization - the expression of the liberal conviction that society can manage itself and needs no central plan.

Never forget that no government has wealth of its own to spend. The money has to come from taxation, monetary inflation, or debt expansion that must be paid later. And government's spending choices will always be uneconomic relative to how society would use that wealth. That is to say, the money will be wasted.

The people and the warmakers are two distinct groups. We must never say 'we' when discussing the US government's foreign policy. For one thing, the warmakers do not care about the opinions of the majority of Americans. It is silly and embarrassing for Americans to speak of 'we' when discussing their government's foreign policy, as if their input were necessary to or desired by those who make war.

Even as the government dominates the headlines, private entrepreneurs are busy every day working to improve products and services that improve our lives. They do it without taxing us or regulating us, or making us suffer through tedious elections or political debates. They make their products and offer them to us in a way that pleases the consuming public the most. We can choose whether we want them or not.

We like to imagine that in history, truth will prevail through sheer persuasive power. Sadly, this is not the case. Truth needs champions ...

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

The Fed is pushing a variety of workarounds that would inject trillions in new money into the economy while bypassing the banking system altogether. Time will tell whether or not this will succeed. Meanwhile, a serious danger lurks around the corner. Once the recession is over, the lending will start again. With fractional-reserve banking and limitless supplies of cash on hand, we will likely see the overall price trends reversed, from deflation to inflation to possible hyperinflation.

The private sector is creating a miracle a day, even as the stuff that government attempts is failing left and right.

To centralize power in the name of freedom is akin to putting a crime syndicate in charge of rooting out corruption. It is the normal state of politics that the more centralized it is, the more damage it does. Fast-track authority [for government-to-government trade agreements] centralizes power and is therefore part of the problem.

Money out of nothing is money that is eventually worth nothing.

Socialized medicine must fail for the same reasons all socialism must fail: it offers no system for rationally allocating resources, and instead promotes the overutilization of all resources, ending in bankruptcy.

Now, it is sometimes said that medical care is too important to be left to the market, and that it is immoral to profit from the illnesses of others. I say medical care is too important to be left to the failed central plans of the political class. And as for profiting from providing medical care, we can never be reminded enough that in a free society, a profit is a signal that valuable services are being rendered to people on a voluntary basis.

The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government's involvement at all.

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.

Government planning not only fails; it tends to produce outcomes that are the opposite of what its proponents say that they favor. The only stable and productive social system is one that embraces human liberty in its totality, and defends the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive.

The state is and has been in history a source of disorder and chaos, and this problem gets worse the more the state grows.

Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized.

Wealth is not a given or an accident of history. It is not bestowed on us like rain from above. It is the product of human creativity in an environment of freedom. The freedom to own, to make contracts, to save, to invest, to associate, and to trade: these are the key to prosperity.

Among the most urgent political priorities of our age is the separation of economy and state.

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.

The laws of economics tell us that the expansion of the central state can't go on forever. Its limit is reached when the looted turn on the looters.

Without market prices for capital goods, accounting is not possible. You don't know if you are making money or losing money, saving resources or wasting them, doing the right thing or not doing the right thing.

Always and everywhere, the only serious political issue is what the state should and should not do. All the rest distracts.

Libertarianism is a theory of politics that is so compelling that once you have absorbed it, it becomes the lens through which you end up understanding all economic and political events.

Repeal the entire Banking Act of 1933, and Austrian School economists will cheer, especially if the current system were replaced by a 100%-reserve competitive banking with no central bank. That banking reform would give us a sound money system, meaning no more business cycle, bailouts, or inflation.

In any government bureaucracy, they are not working for you but for the mythical blob called the 'public sector,' which is really nothing but a stash of stolen cash divided among the robber class.

Capitalism, and capitalism alone, has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness and early death.

The most absurd public opinion polls are those on taxes. Now, if there is one thing we know about taxes, it is that people do not want to pay them. If they wanted to pay them, there would be no need for taxes. People would gladly figure out how much of their money the government deserves and send it in. And yet we routinely hear about opinion polls that reveal that the public likes the tax level as it is and might even like it higher. Next they will tell us that the public thinks the crime rate is too low, or that the American people would really like to be in more auto accidents.

The larger the government, the more our livings standards are reduced. We are fortunate as a civilization that the progress of free enterprise generally outpaces the regress of government growth, for, if that were not the case, we would be poorer each year - not just in relative terms, but absolutely poorer too. The market is smart and the government is dumb, and to these attributes do we owe the whole of our economic well-being.

Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals.