Anarcho Capitalism Quotes

I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring. ~ Albert Jay Nock

We wish to break with all aspects of the liberal State: with its welfare and its warfare, its monopoly privileges and its egalitarianism, its repression of victimless crimes whether personal or economic. Only we offer technology without technocracy, growth without pollution, liberty without chaos, law without tyranny, the defense of property rights in one's person and in one's material possessions. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny. ~ Charles Forbes Rene De Montalembert

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

If you personally advocate that I be caged if I don't pay for whatever "government" things YOU want, please don't pretend to be tolerant, or non-violent, or enlightened, or compassionate. Don't pretend you believe in "live and let live," and don't pretend you want peace, freedom or harmony. It's a simple truism that the only people in the world who are willing to "live and let live" are voluntaryists. So you can either PRETEND to care about and respect your fellow man while continuing to advocate widespread authoritarian violence, or you can embrace the concepts of self-ownership and peaceful coexistence, and become an anarchist. ~ Larken Rose

Anarcho-capitalism is to "minimal statism" what a cure is to a painkiller. ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

Man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual's capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly "reforming" their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact they're always busy "reforming" is an implicit admission that they didn't get it right the first 50 times. ~ Lawrence W. Reed

War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, Taxation is Robbery. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire. ~ Lysander Spooner

Here's something I still can't get over. Amazes and thrills me every time. I'm sitting here and want a certain book. So I search, click, and then I have the book. Every time, my heart does a little leap of joy. What a beautiful world the market is making. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United Statesis off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist - because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority. If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract" - but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice - it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.
The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though - nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax" - but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.
Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard [Am ~ Noam Chomsky

Free markets are the real people's revolution. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid. ~ Penn Jillette

It is with government, as Caesar said it was in war, that money and soldiers mutually supported each other; that with
money he could hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort money. ~ Lysander Spooner

The product of scientific achievements should be for sale. The scientist should not. ~ A.E. Samaan

An anarcho-capitalist is someone who agrees that the best way to eliminate the tragedy of the commons is to privatize it away, and realizes that state politics is the mother of all such tragedies. ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

The profit of the one is the profit of the other. ~ Frederic Bastiat

Freedom is the foundation for all wonderful things in life. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law. In that moment the civilized veneer of life changes, as the state props of well-being disappear and are transformed into omens of destruction. The luxury liner becomes a battleship, or the black jolly roger and the red executioner's flag are hoisted on it. ~ Ernst Junger

Anarcho-capitalism: the realization that the only way to effectively govern the market is to have an effective market in governance. ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

Statism ends with an eye roll. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Still another and all-sufficient answer to the argument that the use of spirituous liquors tends to poverty, is that, as a general rule, it puts the effect before the cause. It assumes that it is the use of the liquors that causes the poverty, instead of its being the poverty that causes the use of the liquors. ~ Lysander Spooner

Government is a gang, but not merely as meritorious as a private gang because it claims legal legitimacy. It pillages and uses violence but under the cover of law, and seeks legitimacy not through competition but through the myth of the social contract. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

So what? Why should an a priori proof of the libertarian property theory make any difference? Why not engage in aggression anyway?" Why indeed?! But then, why should the proof that 1+1=2 make any difference? One certainly can still act on the belief that 1+1=3. The obvious answer is "because a propositional justification exists for doing one thing, but not for doing another." But why should we be reasonable, is the next come-back. Again, the answer is obvious. For one, because it would be impossible to argue against it; and further, because the proponent raising this question would already affirm the use of reason in his act of questioning it. This still might not suffice and everyone knows that it would not, for even if the libertarian ethic and argumentative reasoning must be regarded as ultimately justified, this still does not preclude that people will act on the basis of unjustified beliefs either because they don't know, they don't care, or they prefer not to know. I fail to see why this should be surprising or make the proof somehow defective. ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

What is a price? It is a proposed point of agreement between a buyer and seller. The proposal is the key. It is not a marching order. Past prices represent deals done in history. Current prices represent possible deals in the future. Prices embed vast information about perceived realities: resource availability, consumer demand, cultural biases and habits, speculations about the future. The price is also an amazing tool. It provides an objective basis for accounting and the assessment of profit and loss. Without prices, real prices rooted in real market experience, we'd been lost. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

A multi-party system is a system in which multiple political parties run for national election thus turning it into a multi-party chaos. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

People are more willing to support the exercise of authority over themselves when they believe it to be an objective, neutral feature of the natural world. This was the idea behind the concept of the divine right of kings. By making the king appear to be an integral part of God's plan for the world rather than an ordinary human being dominating his fellows by brute force, the public could be more easily persuaded to bow to his authority. However, when the doctrine of divine right became discredited, a replacement was needed to ensure that the public did not view political authority as merely the exercise of naked power. That replacement is the concept of the rule of law. ~ John Hasnas

Ultimately, we need to take control over the money supply out of the hands of our governments and make the production of money again subject to the principle of free association. The first step to endorsing and promoting this strategy is to realize that governments do not - indeed cannot - fulfill any positive role whatever through the control of our money. ~ Jorg Guido Hulsmann

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people. ~ Robert Higgs

Moreover, in the system of criminal punishment in the libertarian world, the emphasis would never be, as it is now, on "society's" jailing the criminal; the emphasis would necessarily be on compelling the criminal to make restitution to the victim of his crime. The present system, in which the victim is not recompensed but instead has to pay taxes to support the incarceration of his own attacker - would be evident nonsense in a world that focuses on the defense of property rights and therefore on the victim of crime. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of 'free contract' between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else. ~ Noam Chomsky

Nearly all libertarians were once conservatives or progressives or independent statists of some stripe. But scarcely any conservatives, progressives, or independent statists were once libertarians. This asymmetry in the direction of ideological migration is interesting and perhaps informative. ~ Robert Higgs

The free market is not a system. It is not a policy dictated by anyone in particular. It is not something that Washington implements. It does not exist in any legislation, law, bill, regulation, or book. It is what you get when people act on their own, entirely without central direction, and with their own property, and within human associations of their own creation and in their own interest. It is the beauty that emerges in absence of control. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

There's a huge swath of humanity that has developed verbal abilities to extract resources from guilt-ridden people.
They used to be priests, and now they're leftists. ~ Stefan Molyneux

The disdain of profit is due to ignorance, and to an attitude that we may if we wish admire in the ascetic who has chosen to be content with a small share of the riches of this world, but which, when actualised in the form of restrictions on profits of others, is selfish to the extent that it imposes asceticism, and indeed deprivations of all sorts, on others. ~ Friedrich Hayek

If you lived with a roommate as unstable as capitalism ... ~ Richard D. Wolff

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles. ~ Ayn Rand

any form of expression that ceases to be an experience and becomes an art form loses its glowing divinity ~ Jo M. Sekimonyo

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth. ~ Leonard E. Read

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic. ~ Adam Gopnik

I think we've been dulled by capitalism. We're just blobs now - we're so worried about how we can keep paying the lease on the car, the mortgage, the lease on the toaster and all that. You can't really think about much else. If you lose that, you lose the whole lot. ~ Rupert Everett

Money commands everything because that's our interpretation of capitalism ... what kind of world is that? It's a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots. ~ Muhammad Yunus

...we should in the interests of accuracy refer not to 'democratic free market capitalism' but to 'plutocratic impunity capitalism'. ~ Robert Wade

For all its apparent tolerance, the USA maintains a peculiar balance between the forces of capitalism and democracy. To achieve this I feel sure the country is guided by some hidden force; an organization working in secrecy, powerful enough to dispose of the Kennedys and of anyone else who gets in its way. ~ Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

As an economic doctrine it does not stand up to scientific probing. Marx's economic theories are not a scientific account of the nature and extent of exploitation under capitalism. They nevertheless offer a vivid picture of an uncontrolled society in which the productive workers unconsciously create the instruments of their own oppression. It is a picture of human alienation, writ large as the dominance of past labour, or capital, over living labour. ~ Anonymous

If a person has no conscience, it's called being a sociopath. If a corporation has no conscience, it's called capitalism. ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault. ~ Paul Ryan

Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. ~ Jonathan Crary

In the end, one or the other will triumph - a funeral dirge will be sung over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Marx, however imperfectly he worked out the details, set himself the task of discovering the law of motion of capitalism, and if there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx. ~ Joan Robinson

Politically progressive black people on the Left who are not nationalist, like myself, share a perspective that promotes the eradication of white supremacy, the de-centering of the West, redressing of biases, and commitment to affirming black self-determination. Yet we add to the critique of white Western imperialism a repudiation of patriarchy, a critique of capitalism, and a concern for interracial coalition building. ~ Bell Hooks

That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished. ~ Eula Biss

Capitalism can be helpful, but it can also be destructive when it's used by huge enterprises worldwide for the sale of weapons. ~ Judy Collins

To be free one must be a slave to reason. But to be a slave to reason (the very condition of freedom) exposes one to both the revisionary power and the constructive compulsion of reason. This susceptibility is terminally amplified once the commitment to the autonomy of reason and autonomous engagement with discursive practices are sufficiently elaborated. That is to say, when the autonomy of reason is understood as the automation of reason and discursive practices - the philosophical rather than classically symbolic thesis regarding artificial general intelligence. ~ Reza Negarestani

Just as in our bodies, every cell must first be "Celfish"; solely responsible for its own survival and once those conditions are met, the value is passed on. That is Free Market Capitalism at the cellular level. ~ Carl T. Johnson

It all goes together," Montana said. "Society wants to sell them things, so it makes them grow up faster. Sexism serves capitalism. ~ Nancy Jo Sales

You see man we are just fucking extras!! Extras in a capitalist blockbuster!~page 75 ~ Winshluss

The true goal of capitalism is monopoly. That is all-total control of whatever market it is you choose to enter, so that you can do with it what you wish... ~ Bryan Gruley

The road to the new society had lengthened and become overgrown sadly since 1904. The working class in many thousands had been shown its errors in thinking, but persisted in them. Very well: the working class must have the rigours of capitalism, and if the rigours were harsh - it serves them right for not accepting socialism. ~ Robert Barltrop

My dad was a labour lawyer, and the ideas that I grew up with - bad management, bad capitalism, robber barons - when I applied this to my own life, I saw that we are all on both sides of the coin. ~ David Mamet

The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians. ~ George Monbiot

Thanks to the Communist Party of China, we now know the path to poverty alleviation is Capitalism. ~ Fareed Zakaria

If one tallied all of the losses suffered by victims of robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts combined, the figure wouldn't even approach what is taken from hardworking Americans' pockets by employers who violate the nation's labor laws. ~ Kathryn Edin

The change would be meaningful only if it was the doing of men of unassailable moral authority, speaking to down-to-earth interests on behalf of higher powers. What was needed was less to give complete freedom to the natural impulses of the merchants than to tie them to some dominant moral position. ~ Georges Bataille

Any intervention, such as that of the German Reichsbank in the Spring of 1923, in which only a small part of the increasing note-expansion was recovered by the banks through the sale of foreign bills, would necessarily be unsuccessful. Led by the idea of opposing speculation, inflationistic governments have allowed themselves to become involved in measures whose meaning is hardly intelligible. Thus at one time the importation of notes, then their exportation, then again both their exportation and importation, have been prohibited. Exporters have been forbidden to sell for their own country's notes, importers to buy with them. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

On January 17, 1991 and for the 43 days that followed, I watched CNN's live coverage of SCUD missiles and bombs fall over Baghdad like rain; then the 12 ½ years of unjust sanctions that killed approximately a million Iraqis, half of which were children under the age of five; then an unjust attack in 2003 that opened the borders to terrorists from all over the world and reduced the cradle of civilization to piles of rubble. The gov. asked us to support their plan or else be considered anti-American and undemocratic and they ask of us the same today, 25 years later, even though history proved they were pro-profit not pro-life. ~ Weam Namou

[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein