Lysander Spooner Quotes

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

A gold standard doesn't imply stability in the prices of the goods and services that people buy every day, it implies a stability in the price of gold itself.

In all Sovereignties in Europe where Paper-Money was introduced, great Inconveniencies happened; upon canceling this Paper Medium all those Inconveniencies did vanish

If, when Money is rais'd [inflation or devaluation], Goods keep the Prices they had before. Then all Goods exported are sold for a lesser Value abroad, and all Goods imported are sold dearer.

The currency of any country, whether it be coin or bank-notes, cannot be increased beyond the mercantile wants of that country, without producing a depreciation in the parts which compose the currency.

The Federal Reserve Act as it stands seems to me to open the way to a vast inflation of the currency... I do not like to think that any law can be passed that will make it possible to submerge the gold standard in a flood of irredeemable paper currency.

Americans have seen the value of the dollar slowly decline due to the steady erosion of inflation.

There is never enough gold to redeem all the currency in circulation.

The spectacle of a great, solvent government paying a fictitious price for gold it did not want and did not need and doing it on purpose to debase the value of its own paper currency was one to astonish the world.

When people begin anticipating inflation, it doesn't do you any good anymore, because any benefit of inflation comes from the fact that you do better than you thought you were going to do.

When not only gold but all commodities are available for the redemption of the paper currency, its volume is limited only by the value of all the wealth of the country, and it can never become insecure up to this limit.

The price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934, but by the time the U.S. got through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, with all the associated secular inflation, the price level had gone up nearly three times.

The power to regulate the value of money does not involve a power to dilute the value of money by inflation, an absurd and self-serving rendering.

Inflation is everywhere and anywhere a monetary phenomenon.

Bad money drives out good money.

It is not repeated large Emissions [printing] of a base Paper-Currency, but our Imports exceeding our Exports, that occasions Silver to be ship'd off in Ballance

Prices of every thing depend on the proportion between commodities and money, and that any considerable alteration on either has the same effect, either of heightening or lowering the price.

The Power the Magistrat [head of government] has to alter the Money in its Denomination or Fineness, takes away the chief Quality for which Silver was made Money

When you get inflation, you get massive distortions of the economy.

Manifestly nothing is more vital to our supremacy as a nation and to the beneficent purposes of our Government than a sound and stable currency. Its exposure to degradation should at once arouse to activity the most enlightened statesmanship, and the danger of depreciation in the purchasing power of the wages paid to toil should furnish the strongest incentive to prompt and conservative precaution.

I don't know anything about free silver, [but] the people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.

A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you're managing the U.S. Mint, buy a penny.

In the simplest terms, inflation occurs when there's too much money in the system. On the flip side, deflation occurs when there are too few dollars in circulation.

If you increase the quantity of money, you bring about the lowering of the purchasing power of the monetary unit.

Is it any more moral to dilute the value of the purchasing power of the money you hold in your wallet than it is for the farmer to dilute the milk supply with water?