"Money is different from all other commodities: other things being equal, more shoes, or more discoveries of oil or copper benefit society, since they help alleviate natural scarcity. But once a commodity is established as a money on the market, no more money at all is needed. Since the only use of money is for exchange and reckoning, more dollars or pounds or marks in circulation cannot confer a social benefit: they will simply dilute the exchange value of every existing dollar or pound or mark. So it is a great boon that gold or silver are scarce and are costly to increase in supply. But if government manages to establish paper tickets or bank credit as money, as equivalent to gold grams or ounces, then the government, as dominant money-supplier, becomes free to create money costlessly and at will. As a result, this 'inflation' of the money supply destroys the value of the dollar or pound, drives up prices, cripples economic calculation, and hobbles and seriously damages the workings of the market economy."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Educators from the United StatesAnarcho-capitalistsNon-fiction authorsEconomists from the United StatesAustrian School economists
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"Taking Money Back", in The Freeman (September - October 1995).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and viol…"
"The natural tendency of the state is inflation."
"All interstate wars intensify aggression – maximize it … some wars are even more unjust than others. In other words, …"
"I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or p…"
"Harold, the young kids out there are not going to be willing to go to the barricades in defense of lowered transactio…"
"In 1756 Edmund Burke published his first work: Vindication of Natural Society. Curiously enough it has been almost co…"
"Barnes dismissed his own past criticism of the World War II unconditional surrender policy as valid but superficial; …"
"If ‘we are the government,’ then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical; it is…"
"It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government…"
"The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themse…"