Murray Rothbard Quotes

I am a believer in Adam Smith, who says that if you look at something that really contributes value to society, and you can deliver it at a reasonable price, then society will recognise that at some point because rational behaviour will come into play.

I'm a free-market economist from years and years back, and I've never veered from that.

Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

The law of supply and demand holds eternal.

Traditionally in capitalism, when you have more cash, you can fund more activity, which produces more jobs and creates more wealth. That's basic economic theory.

That's the trick of free market economic theory: it doesn't just ask you to only be selfish and not care about others. It tells you that by being selfish, you are helping others. And, in fact, by trying to directly help others, you will hurt them.

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.

Markets are the best way to allocate resources.

I'm not an expert in it, but it seems to me that you have to let the market forces go their course.

We are so accustomed to the miracle of private enterprise that we habitually take it for granted. But how does private industry solve the incredibly complex problem of turning out tens of thousands of different goods and services in the proportions in which they are wanted by the public? ... It solves these problems through the institutions of private property, competition, the free market, and the existence of money - through the interrelations of supply and demand, costs and prices, profits and losses.

Competition is good and has served us well.

The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.

Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling faiths, each with its own doctrines.

To talk about planning an economic system is to talk in old terms, and I find myself sometimes having to teach Westers about what the market really means.

I prefer leaving things to the market as much as possible.

As soon, however, as capitalist competition has definitively established the equal rate of profit, that rate becomes the starting point for the calculations of the capitalists in the investment of capital in newly-created branches of production.

Contrary to the claims of some of my critics and some of the editorial pages, I am an ardent believer in the free market.

Value is consequently the necessary theoretical starting point whence we can elucidate the peculiar phenomenon of prices resulting from capitalist competition.

I do believe in the free market.

The free market is at its best when everybody works in a fishbowl and tells you their point of view.

The basis of the free market is anytime you can generate revenue or profit, you've created value in excess of the resources you consume in a society. That's probably the most unbiased utility function there is, as opposed to someone's opinion.

For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights.

America has always understood this principle of the economy - that everyone can benefit when everyone competes.

Our markets have not achieved their great successes as a result of government fiat, but rather through efforts of competing interests working to meet the demands of investors and to fulfill the promises posed by advancing technology.