Murray Rothbard Quotes

The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people's pockets but to put more responsibility in people's pockets.

Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.

The welfare state may be well-intentioned, but it is a Ponzi scheme

One of the things that made the marriage between liberty and popular sovereignty possible was the welfare state. Democracy has three parts. It has liberty, it has popular sovereignty, and it has a social safety net as well

More taxes mean more money to spend for public welfare.

The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results.

There are some people who seem to think that the way you reduce the cost of living in this country is for the state to spend more and more taxpayers' money. It is as if somehow you measure the compassion of the government by the amount of other people's money it can spend.

The seeds of today's runaway government were planted when it was decided that government should help those who can't help themselves. From that modest, compassionate beginning to today's out-of-control mega-state, there's a straight, unbroken line. Once the door was open, once it was settled that the government should help some people at the expense of others, there was no stopping it.

Any allegation of runaway capitalism has to be tempered by the observation that today we have the largest public sectors and the highest taxes the world has ever known.

I don''t know if I like communism, and I don''t know if I like socialism. But I know that the Breakfast for Children Program feeds my kids. And if you put your hands on that Breakfast for Children Program . . .

The real issue, as far as Democrats are concerned, is the number of people receiving something from the government. This is exactly what Franklin Delano Roosevelt had in mind when he created this monster. And Clinton is planning to expand it beyond Roosevelt's wildest dreams.

Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing army of pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a halt - and quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become.

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people's money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

You've got the Democratic Party that now depends on more government spending and actual building the dependence on government in order to increase their political party.

I don't like a lot of social programs either because it makes you non-productive.

When you talk about entitlement programs, it's not just about - it's not about cutting those programs. It is about saving those programs. Those programs are on a path of fiscal unsustainability.

If you throw a welfare state into the middle of a democracy, it’s very hard to get rid of the beast.

What the government gives it must first take away.

A mature welfare state is always broke.

It is not in accordance with the genius of our Government or our country to pay pensions.

Tell Congress to go home and make an honest living instead of riding on the backs of the taxpayers.

Unless we get entitlement costs under control, Social Security will inevitably square off against national security.

We have not abandoned our old belief in liberty, justice, and Self-help, but we say that under certain conditions the people cannot help themselves, and that then they should be helped by the State representing directly the whole people.

People like entitlements. That's why we spend so much on them.