Friedrich Hayek Quotes

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .

Printing money is merely taxation in another form.

Printing money creates inflation, which weakens an economy. Unfortunately, this kind of common-sense thinking never seems to penetrate academic circles.

The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy.

Printing money is the last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed.

When you give government the power to control the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself.

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It is made by or stopped by the central bank.

Who controls the issuance of money controls the government!

The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.

I think the Fed is not designed to have effective tools to deal with the economy. It should settle for just controlling the money supply. And - if it insists, it can worry about inflation.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.

I’ve always been a little nervous about the Fed. Quite frankly, I’m a little nervous about the degree of their independence.

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over.

The United States has experienced high rates of inflation in the past and appears to be running the same type of fiscal policies that engendered hyperinflations in 20 countries over the past century.

The Federal Reserve is the overlord of the money supply. If these two are not steering in the same direction, they can either neutralize each other or have the economy lurching in all directions. This is not a rational system for setting economic policy. It has given us trouble in the past, as the text will establish, and will inevitably in the future.

Inflation is the true opium of the people and it is administered to them by anticapitalist governments and parties.

Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.

Monetary inflation not only raises prices and destroys the value of the currency unit; it also acts as a giant system of expropriation.

We shall take whatever action is necessary to contain the growth of the money supply. The government, unlike so many of its predecessors, will face up to economic realities.

All present-day governments are fanatically committed to an easy money policy.

Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it.

If Congress wanted to intervene with the Federal Reserve, well, we created the Federal Reserve. We could uncreate it. But would you want Congress regulating the money supply? We'd have drowned in inflation, or gone bankrupt, decades ago.

What is the effect of unlimited coinage of silver in this country? and I invite your attention to this particularly, because it is a question of vital importance.

The phrase 'perception is reality' is overused generally. But perception can be reality in monetary policy. The bond market doesn't act merely on what it sees. It acts on what it expects of the Fed or the government.