Anarcho Capitalists

"If printing money would end poverty, printing diplomas would end stupidity."

"The market is not a mere graph describing a curve of supply and demand. The market is a mechanism for social cooperation, where you voluntarily exchange ownership rights. Therefore based on this definition, talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures."

"We have come here today to invite the Western world to get back on the path to prosperity. Economic freedom, limited government and unlimited respect for private property are essential elements for economic growth. The impoverishment produced by collectivism is not a fantasy, nor is it an inescapable fate. It’s a reality that we Argentines know very well."

"My contempt for the state is infinite."

"Countries that have more freedom are 12 times richer than those that are repressed. The lowest percentile in free countries is better off than 90% of the population in repressed countries. Poverty is 25 times lower and extreme poverty is 50 times lower. And citizens in free countries live 25% longer than citizens in repressed countries."

"The pie will be smaller, and this will harm society as a whole. Collectivism, by inhibiting these discovery processes and hindering the appropriation of discoveries, ends up binding the hands of entrepreneurs and prevents them from offering better goods and services at a better price."

"In other words, capitalist successful business people are social benefactors who, far from appropriating the wealth of others, contribute to the general well-being. Ultimately, a successful entrepreneur is a hero."

"Fortunately there’s more and more of us who are daring to make our voices heard, because we see that if we don’t truly and decisively fight against these ideas, the only possible fate is for us to have increasing levels of state regulation, socialism, poverty and less freedom, and therefore, worse standards of living."

"The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that no matter how rich you may be, how much you may have in terms of natural resources, how skilled your population may be, how educated, or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank – if measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of gdps, competition, price systems, trade and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty."

"Thirty five years after we adopted the model of freedom, back in 1860, we became a leading world power. And when we embraced collectivism over the course of the last 100 years, we saw how our citizens started to become systematically impoverished, and we dropped to spot number 140 globally."

"Libertarianism already provides for equality of the sexes. The cornerstone of our creed is that all humans are created equal and that we all have the same inalienable rights granted by the Creator, including life, freedom and ownership."

"It should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it’s been tried out. It’s been a failure economically, socially, culturally and it also murdered over 100 million human beings."

"Far from being the cause of our problems, free trade capitalism as an economic system is the only instrument we have to end hunger, poverty and extreme poverty across our planet. The empirical evidence is unquestionable."

"If the goods or services offered by a business are not wanted, the business will fail unless it adapts to what the market is demanding. They will do well and produce more if they make a good quality product at an attractive price. So the market is a discovery process in which the capitalists will find the right path as they move forward."

"But if the state punishes capitalists when they’re successful and gets in the way of the discovery process, they will destroy their incentives, and the consequence is that they will produce less."

"Now what is it that we mean when we talk about libertarianism? And let me quote the words of the greatest authority on freedom in Argentina, Professor Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr, who says that libertarianism is the unrestricted respect for the life project of others based on the principle of non-aggression, in defence of the right to life, liberty and property."

"If transactions are voluntary, the only context in which there can be market failure is if there is coercion and the only one that is able to coerce generally is the state, which holds a monopoly on violence."

"Unfortunately, these harmful ideas have taken a stronghold in our society. Neo-Marxists have managed to co-opt the common sense of the Western world, and this they have achieved by appropriating the media, culture, universities and also international organisations."

"We should remember that by the year 1800, about 95% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. And that figure dropped to 5% by the year 2020, prior to the pandemic. The conclusion is obvious."

"“Speech of Argentina’s President Javier Milei at Davos – Transcript” Eurasiareview"

"You are wrong, Milei [...] you who were put in Argentina to destroy the rule of law, to destroy the State, to destroy all social and labour rights, to destroy the national economy and to colonise Argentina and deliver it to the knees of North American imperialism."

"If we look at the history of economic progress, we can see how between the year zero and the year 1800 approximately, world per capita GDP practically remained constant throughout the whole reference period."

"Today I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty"

"The state does not create wealth; the state destroys it. The state can give you nothing because it produces nothing, and when it attempts it, it does so poorly."

"However, faced with the theoretical demonstration that state intervention is harmful – and the empirical evidence that it has failed couldn’t have been otherwise – the solution proposed by collectivists is not greater freedom but rather greater regulation, which creates a downward spiral of regulations until we are all poorer and our lives depend on a bureaucrat sitting in a luxury office."

"We have learned to project onto politicians our capacities for favorably directing our lives, and have come to identify political action as our most effective attribute. If governments are strong, it is because we are weak."

"The State has encouraged us to develop expectations of other people, and promised to compel the fulfillment of those expectations. It has persuaded us that others are the cause of our failures, and that others should be responsible for our happiness and well-being. It has offered to save us the effect of developing self-discipline, convincing us of the superiority of institutionally-imposed discipline in providing for social order. It has pandered to our worst fears about ourselves and others, concocting bogeymen and perilous threats from which it has promised protection."

"One cannot be devoutly religious, or patriotic, or moral, without differentiating oneself from the ungodly, the disloyal, or the immoral. To be for one’s own group, or nation, or race requires that one be against strangers."

"The history of institutionalized society has been principally one of the organization and management of conflict. Do institutions not encourage the duality in our thinking that promotes the practices of projecting good and bad characteristics onto others? Do they not encourage and exploit both scapegoating and authority worship, continually reminding us of the presence of some object of fear or hared, or some other source of conflict, and consoling us that they, alone, can make our lives secure?"

"Almost all of us have been raised in the belief that political institutions are necessary to provide order and harmony in society. In fact, we have been taught that the political State is synonymous with society itself; that the political State energizes and organizes society, creates and protects human rights, and make economic and social life possible."

"As the creators of sophisticated technologies, we have made ourselves increasingly machine-like; robotic servants of institutional systems we have been conditioned to revere, whose purposes we neither understand nor control, and of which we are afraid to ask questions. Our corporate-state world plunders, enslaves, controls and destroys us, all in the name of advancing our liberty and material well-being. Most of us are dominated by an unfocused fear of uncertainty, a longing for the security of emptiness."

"The hubris that attends all political programs of central planning is fueled by an ignorance of the forces of chaos."

"The belief that order must be intentionally generated and imposed upon society by institutional authorities continues to prevail. This centrally-directed model is premised upon what F.A. Hayek called ‘the fatal conceit,’ namely, the proposition ‘that man is able to shape the world according to his wishes,’ or what David Ehrenfeld labeled ‘the arrogance of humanism.’ That such practices have usually failed to produce their anticipated results has generally led not to a questioning of the model itself, but to the conclusion that failed policies have suffered only from inadequate leadership, or a lack of sufficient information, or a failure to better articulate rules. Once such deficiencies have been remedied, it has been supposed, new programs can be implemented which, reflective of this mechanistic outlook, will permit government officials to ‘fine tune’ or ‘jump start’ the economy, or ‘grow’ jobs, or produce a ‘quick fix’ for the ailing government school system."

"The efforts of one organism to live at the expense of another is, when confined to members of the same species, a form of cannibalism."

"Even as modern society manifests its collapse in the form of violent crime, economic dislocation, seemingly endless warfare, inter-group hostilities, the decay of cities, a growing disaffection with institutions, and a general sense that nothing ‘works right’ anymore, faith in the traditional model continues to drive the pyramidal systems. Most people still cling to the belief that there is something that can be done by political institutions to change such conditions: a new piece of legislation can be enacted, a judicial ruling can be ordered, or a new agency regulation can be promulgated. When a government-run program ends in disaster, the mechanistic mantra is invariably invoked: ‘we will find out what went wrong and fix it so that this doesn’t happen again.’ That the traditional model itself, which is grounded in the state’s power to control the lives and property of individuals to desired ends, may be the principal contributor to such social disorder goes largely unexplored."

"Businessmen came to embrace the industrial theology of ‘responsibility,’ and learned a new set of cartelizing catechisms. The campaign to reform trade practices and promote ‘fair’ competition had little, if anything, to do with business ethics, efficiency, ‘justice,’ ‘fairness,’ the elimination of waste, or any of the other rationalizations employed on behalf of ‘industrial self-rule.’ It was, instead, part of a strategy designed to secure the political supervision indispensable to the group domination of industry members. Only in the structuring of economic behavior, it came to be thought, could the status quo be maintained against the inconstancies and uncertainties of the marketplace."

"There prevails a highly romanticized view of the small, independent retailer as the paladin for a system of free and open competition. An examination of the evidence, however, reveals few trades with a better track record than independent retailers at getting to the political arena with programs for depriving somebody of a competitive advantage. Virtually every innovation in retailing has met with the organized and vocal opposition of retailers who were unwilling to adjust their own selling methods to meet the competition, and who responded with legislative proposals to preserve the status quo."

"For our world to be predictable and controllable, it must be mechanistic and linear in nature. But, the illusions of the behaviorists to the contrary notwithstanding, there is nothing less mechanistic and linear in nature than the human mind, whose intricacies and capacities have yet to be matched by even the most sophisticated computers."

"Modern society is in a state of turbulence brought about, in large part, by political efforts to maintain static, equilibrium conditions; practices that interfere with the ceaseless processes of change that provide the fluctuating order upon which any creative system—such as the marketplace—depends. Institutions, being ends in themselves, have trained us to resist change and favor the status quo; to insist upon the certain and the concrete and to dismiss the uncertain and the fanciful; and to embrace security and fear risk. Life, on the other hand is change, is adaptation, creativity, and novelty. But creativity has always depended upon a fascination with the mysterious, and an appreciation for the kinds of questions that reveal more than answers can ever provide. When creative processes become subordinated to preserving established interests; when the glorification of systems takes priority over the sanctity of individual lives, societies begin to lose their life-sustaining vibrancy and may collapse."

"Western Civilization is in the crisis it is because we have sacrificed more profound values than the immediate and quantifiable consequences we tend to associate with the pursuit of our material interests. Among these are peace; liberty; respect for property, contracts, and the inviolability of the individual; truthfulness and the development of the mind; integrity; distrust of power; a sense of spirituality; and philosophically-principled behavior. But when our culture becomes driven by material concerns, these less tangible values recede in importance, and our thinking becomes dominated by the need to preserve the organizational forms that we see as having served our interests."

"We offset the pursuit of our well-being with notions of altruism, and temper our happiness with feelings of guilt. In the vernacular of pop psychology, we speak of being ‘self-alienated’ people who have learned to reject our very selves. Whatever other advantages flow to us from our institutionalized world, the personal disadvantages carry a prohibitive price tag."

"We delude ourselves with the beliefs that the establish order suffers from only from policy or style defects, and that the new leadership or legislation or organization reforms are sufficient to overcome any problems. We can tinker with the machinery, but dare not think of doing without it. We may be willing to believe that the emperor is naked, but certainly not the empire itself."

"Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge ‘our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor’ not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us."

"Those who do not understand the Amish often imagine that their resistance to new technologies arises from a sense of ‘evil’ they see in such tools. But this is not the case. The Amish do employ tools, but if someone wants to consider bringing a new technology into the community, the Amish study it with this thought in mind: will acceptance of this technology make us dependent upon the external world, such that we will be tempted to change our ways? An automobile, for instance, would make the Amish have to rely on parts manufacturers, tire and battery sellers, and petroleum companies to keep it operative."

"If, on one occasion, a police officer brutalizes a harmless individual, does that mean that a police-state has arisen? No, but intelligent minds should recognize that such totalitarian consequences are implicit in such an act, and should respond accordingly. I am reminded of that powerful scene at the end of the movie, Judgment at Nuremberg. Judge Haywood (played by Spencer Tracy) has been called to the jail cell of the Nazi judge (played by Burt Lancaster) who has just been given a life sentence for his crimes. The convicted judge tells Judge Haywood: ‘Those people, those millions of people. . . I never knew it would come to that.’ Judge Haywood replies: ‘it ‘came to that’ the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.’"

"To Toto fell the task of exposing the humbuggery that manipulated both the institutional machinery and followers. Because he did not share his companions’ trembling reverence for established wizardry, this free-spirited, tagalong mutt was able to approach the screen that separated the leaders from the followers. In knocking over that screen, however, Toto did far more than simply reveal the systematic bamboozlement of the Ozians. He also made it possible for his companions to discover that the personal qualities they had labored to earn as institutionally-bestowed rewards, were qualities that had always been within themselves. In believing that the virtues they sought lay outside themselves, and that some institutional alchemy could convert their leaden instincts to golden conduct (to paraphrase Herbert Spencer), they had set themselves up to be manipulated and exploited for the benefit of institutional interests."

"Every institution is a racket. Whether we are considering political, religious, economic, ideological, or educational institutions, each is a formal, elaborate system designed for one purpose: to control people. Each seeks to persuade or compel individual to divert their energies from the pursuit of private, personal objectives, and to dedicate themselves to organizational purposes."

"Firms with established market positions wanted to reduce the impact of such competition and employed voluntary methods (such as mergers, pooling, trade association ‘codes of ethics,’ and other agreements) in efforts to stabilize competitive relationships. When such voluntary means failed due to lack of effective enforcement, influential corporate leaders, having found a condition of unrestrained competition and decision-making unacceptable to their interests, helped promote the enactment of legal restraints upon trade practices."

"During the years 1918-38, notions of economic autonomy and self-regulating market behavior confronted the forces of industrial concentration. Free competition-with attendant low prices and aggressive trade practices—was identified with the older, unstructured forms of organization characterized by smaller, self-governing business firms. An unrestrained marketplace brought with it the specter of incessant change, a condition that was unacceptable to those charged with the responsibilities of managing and preserving the assets and market positions of business organizations. In the confrontation between ‘individualism’ and ‘instituti6nalism,’ competition came to be identified with the decentralized, unstructured practices representing the past. Individual self-interest, with its decentralizing tendencies, had to be suppressed in favor of the emerging institutional order. The attack on autonomy was a defense of the new order: the institutionally dominant, centrally directed, collective society."

"[I]nstitutions are the principle means by which conflict is produced and managed in society. Peace is incompatible with institutional activity. Stated in another way, the success of institutions depends upon the creation of those conditions in which personal and social conflict will flourish."