[Use of word "neoliberalism"] dates from the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in Paris in 1938, a gathering of those who used to define liberalism in terms of the limited government, individualistic, free market sense dominant before ‘liberalism’ started to be used by those with more statist, collectivist and interventionist views in the late 19th century.  Participants at the Colloquium included figures still well known as representatives of the older understanding of liberalism: Hayek, Mises, Wilhelm Röpke.  However, the word has been used in an overwhelmingly negative sense by left wing critics of market liberalisation since the 1970s, and advocates of what in 1938 was referred to in 1938 came to prefer terms like classical liberal, market liberal, and libertarianism.

Barry Stocker

You don’t normally associate the leftist high priest Michel Foucault—likely the most influential figure in American academia during the last 40 years and the most cited intellectual in the humanities—with libertarian economists such as F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, and Milton Friedman. Yet five years before his death in 1984, Foucault gave a generally appreciative series of Paris lectures on classical liberalism that have finally been translated into English. In The Birth of Biopolitics (Palgrave MacMillan), Foucault, always focused on the exercise of power and repression, tells his students to read Hayek and crew “with special care.” He found much to commend in their work. First and foremost, true liberalism is “imbued with the principle: ‘One always governs too much.’” As important, it asks (and answers) the question, “Why, after all, is it necessary to govern?”

Nick Gillespie "Hayek, Mises…and Foucault?"

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.

Ayn Rand "Atlas Shrugged"

Under the present conditions a government exists only by the exclusion of all the others, and one party can rule only after smashing its opponents; a majority is always harassed by a minority which is impatient to govern. Under such conditions it is quite inevitable that the parties hate each other and live, if not at war, at least in a state of armed peace. Who is surprised to see that minorities intrigue and agitate, and that governments put down by force any aspiration to a different political form which would be similarly exclusive? So society ends up composed of ambitious resentful men, waiting for vengeance, and ambitious power-sated men, sitting complacently on the edge of a precipice.

Paul Emile de Puydt "Panarchy"

Each generation is like a new tenant who, before moving in, changes things around, cleans up the facade, and adds or pulls down an annex, according to his own needs. From time to time some generation, more vigorous or short-sighted than its predecessors, pulls down the whole building, sleeping out in the open until it is rebuilt. When, after a thousand privations and with enormous efforts, they have managed to rebuild it to a new plan, they are crestfallen to find it is not much more comfortable than the old one. It is true that those who drew up the plans are set up in good apartments, well situated, warm in winter and cool in summer; but the others, who had no choice, are relegated to the garrets, the basements or the lofts.

Paul Emile de Puydt "Panarchy"

This idea that women are victimized by some vast conspiracy - patriarchy. (...) Everyone knows the old saying, women and children first. Women and children first. Basically that men are disposable like toy soldiers you can throw into the fire of war. Men are disposable. (...) Why is it women first before men? Well, biologically we gonna sort of understand that, right? Eggs are more rare and harder to grow than sperm. Yeah, but we suppose to sum out biology in civilization, right? That's sort of the point of civilization is to not be run by base animal instincts.

Now, who were oppressed were slaves. They were really oppressed. And if the riverboat went down there was no ethic that says, slaves first on the lifeboat, save the slaves first and foremost, let the rich white slave owner jerk slave die, but save those slaves. But the ethic throughout almost whole of the human history was, safe the women at the expence of the men. That doesn't really sound a lot like patriarchy to me.

Stefan Molyneux "The Mythology of the Working Mom"

What would be the second last step in [the progression to police state]? When would you know that it's coming? Wouldn't it be to see that government overseeing a construction of a giant wall around the border? So that nobody could get out? Now, of course if that did start to happen and then the aliens zoom in for a closer listen they wouldn't hear government officials telling everybody:

- OK, guess what? Actually we were a bunch of tyrans. All along we were planning to take away your liberties and this is the final step right before we drop the hammer. We just build this wall so you literally can't escape anymore. Ha, ha, surprise!

No, they wouldn't say that. What they would say is:

- Well, yeah, the budget's tight, we gotta make tough choices all over the place but the people have spoken. You're sick and tired of these Mexicans coming and stealing your jobs, overwhelming the public school system. We hear you, we hear you. (...) We will finally build that giant wall, we'll have the dogs, we'll have the guys with night vision gogles patrolling and we'll have the helicopters. (...) We'll put up an electric fense, what have you. Yes, we will do what you people ask for to protect you, to keep out those drug traffickers, all those horrible things that we know are being caused by these poorest southern border. We'll solve that. And we'll have this wise expenditure of public funds on your behalf, because you live in the best, freest country on earth. God bless America.

...as they build that wall.

Robert Murphy "Closed Border Keeps You In"

Small governments have many close competitors. If they tax and regulate their own subjects visibly more than their competitors, they are bound to suffer from the emigration of labor and capital. Moreover, the smaller the country, the greater will be the pressure to opt for free trade rather than protectionism. Every government interference with foreign trade leads to relative impoverishment, at home as well as abroad. But the smaller a territory and its internal markets, the more dramatic this effect will be. If the U.S. engaged in protectionism, U.S. average living standards would fall, but no one would starve. If a single city, say Monaco, did the same, there would be almost immediate starvation. Consider a single household as the conceivably smallest secessionist unit. By engaging in unrestricted free trade, even the smallest territory can be fully integrated in the world market and partake of every advantage of the division of labor. Indeed, its owners may become the wealthiest people on earth. On the other hand, if the same household owners decided to forego all inter-territorial trade, abject poverty or death would result. Accordingly, the smaller the territory and its internal market, the more likely it is that it will opt for free trade.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe "Economics, Philosophy, and Politics"

What is new about the Buchanan-Tullock school is its theory of the State and political (as contrasted to economic) action. However, this innovation is patently false.

Buchanan and Tullock think the State is essentially a voluntary institution, on a par with private business firms. They claim that 'the market and the State are both devices through which cooperation is organized and made possible.' (Calculus of Consent, p. 19) And since the State is like a firm, Buchanan then concludes in his Limits of Liberty, whatever happens in politics, every status quo, 'must be evaluated as if it were legitimate contractually.'

Hans-Hermann Hoppe "Economics, Philosophy, and Politics"

(...) pure competition can only describe what things would be like if the world contained zombie-like consumers with homogeneous tastes, atomistically structured firms identical in every important respect, with no locational advantages, no ad­vertising, no entrepreneurship, and no rivalry whatever. Surely this is the major flaw and absurdity inherent in the purely com­petitive perspective.

Dominick T. Armentano "A Critique of Neoclassical and Austrian Monopoly Theory"

Government intervention consistently raises prices. (...) The main thrust of the libertarian argument isn't to just say, well, the rich will be charitable and will help the poor. (...) History says that they will be but that's not the main argument. The main argument that I prefer (...) is that on the free market prices tend to fall, equality tends to rise. So any issue that may exist with poverty is likely to be alleviated over time.

lengthyounarther "Market Myths and the Mixed Economy"

Every time you're sitting in traffic on the 405 what you're doing is sitting in a government line. It's like a bread line. It's the same thing, it's the same fundamental principle applied. You're in a line to go somewhere and government is preventing people from going there.

Adam Kokesh

Prices are an incentive wrapped in knowledge.

Steve Horwitz "Are We Running Out of Resources?"

I wanna start with a simple thought experiment for the libertarians and classical liberals out there. Suppose that the harshest critics of the free market were right and you were wrong about the way in which free markets actually work. Suppose that free market really do lead the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. Suppose they lead the poor and working classes to live lifes of constant and increasing alienation in which they're continually subjected to exploitation and domination by those of greater economic power. If all this were true, would you still support the free market? If not, or if you had second thoughts, then I want to suggest, that this means you think that how the poor fair in the free markets is more than just an attractive selling point for free market views. It's a crucial element in the moral justification. And if you believe that, and I think many libertarians and classical liberals do, then perhaps you're not so far off from believing in an idea that most libertarians think they reject - the idea of social justice.

Matt Zwolinski "What's Right About Social Justice"

I want to argue that the "order" of the market emerges only from the process of voluntary exchange among the participating individuals. The "order" is, itself, defined as the outcome of the process that generates it. The "it," the allocation-distribution result, does not, and cannot, exist independently of the trading process. Absent this process, there is and can be no "order." (...) Individuals do not act so as to maximize utilities described in independently existing functions. They confront genuine choices, and the sequence of decisions taken may be conceptualized, ex post (after the choices), in terms of "as if" functions that are maximized. But these "as if" functions are, themselves, generated in the choosing process, not separately from such process. If viewed in this perspective, there is no means by which even the most idealized omniscient designer could duplicate the results of voluntary interchange. The potential participants do not know until they enter the process what their own choices will be.

James M. Buchanan "Order Defined in the Process of its Emergence"

People are too quick (...) to dismiss arguments based on signalling rather then actually reading the thing.

Jeffrey Tucker "Brutalism or Humanitarianism?"

It's one of the great, great things about free enterprise - (...) we're surrounded by examples of success and examples of failure. You don't have to do anything, you just look around. You see who's successful and who's failing. That gives you a lot of information on how to live, what kind of profession to pursue, how to go about living your life, what models to copy, what models to avoid. That's a free gift we all enjoy just by living in an enterprising world. That's great stuff. That's like capital being dump on us every day, into our brains, that's fabulous.

Jeffrey Tucker

What I think is that the maximum freedom will be achieved for anyone, women included, when they have the right to negotiate their own contracts. So I don't believe that there should be some wage equality imposed on anyone.

Amanda Billyrock

If guns actually increased crime, then crime should be worse now that it was twenty years ago because the number of guns in the United States has increased about a hundred million but the crime rate, especially a violent crime, has gone down about 40-50 %.

lengthyounarther

As a book publisher I receive manuscipt permissions practically every day. Sometimes two or three books a day. But seven out of ten of these are introductions to libertarianism or introductions to (...) free market economics. I can tell you that we really don't need any more of these. We have plenty of these.

What I don't see enough of are really well written, well researched books on (...) the life of our times. Where's a sort of anarchocapitalist book on the group anonymous? Where's book "Understanding WikiLeaks" and coming to the defence of WikiLeaks? Where's a book on international piracy? There's still not been a very good, detailed book on what happened to banking since 2008. (...) There's so many topics. Unfortunately, they require a lot of research, a lot of time, a lot of work and some competence as a writer, but there's a tremendous opportunity (...) if we're willing to do the work that's necessary. (...) [We need] serious works that are engaging, factual, that actually look out the window, deal with reality in our times and explain our times in the way that animates the theory and makes it more compelling and believable.

Jeffrey Tucker

I would never myself (...) want to appropriate to my position the word "equal". "I have the equal right". I would say, "I have the same right", or "I have full right", or something like that. I think once you're accepting the groundwork of equality, even though there is a sense in which libertarians believe in something like equality of rights, it's very tricky and I don't think you want to ground that term. You want to stick them with it and show them it has deep problems.

Bill Evers "How to Convince a Socialist to Become a Libertarian"

There are different ways of looking at envy in society. There are ways that elevate envy to a kind of a passion that then consumes the society. And really socialism, in my view, is trying to do that. It's an immensely envy conscious, although it doesn't tend to admit this - envy conscious, envy mobilizing movement. I think that if you can draw this into the attention of the person that you're trying to convince, that you're trying to argue with, it will take some of the sense of that person that he or she is on the high ground in arguing for equality away from that. Because (...) you can't congratulate yourself quite as much in arguing for envy, in my view.

Bill Evers "How to Convince a Socialist to Become a Libertarian"

It seems like everybody realizes that almost all of politicians are pathological liers, that they're power hungry, that they're conceded, that they're elitist. And yet people who will readily admit that will then go on to say, "well, these people should have a greater control of our life" (...) You don't need deductive resoning to realize, that that's retarded.

lengthyounarther "The Anti- Empiricism of Statism"

SR: I had a discussion with my doctor the other day. (...) He said you can only make money under Obamacare by running your practice as it is in an assembly line - just running people through with a minimum time. And he said, he doesn't wanna do that. (...) So what happens when new Medicare people can't find doctors? What's the government gonna do then? Start conscripting them? Or making them serve Medicare patients? What they gonna do?

JT: It's typical when the government sort of presumes that production tide is a fixed thing.

SR: Exactly. (...) It's the John Stuart Mill - the problem of production has been solved, we just now have to solve the problem of distribution.

Sheldon Richman, Jeffrey Tucker

[Let's say] there's a bill that's comming up and everybody is in favor of this bill, everybody. Let's suppose it's a bill against, I don't know, strangling puppies. So you tack the pay raise for the politicians onto that bill. And then when people don't vote for it, cause they don't wanna pay their politicians more, then all of the sudden support for this goes into toilet and all you have to say is - so that means you're in favor of strangling puppies! When did you stop strangling puppies or have you?

Karen Straughan

Here's a good one. "Libertarianism is invalid, because it has never existed" (...) All right, fair enough. Then - "libertarianism is the cause of all of our problems". (...) Wait a sec, basic logic here people. If libertarianism has never existed, then it can't be libertarianism's fault that anything has happened. Something that has not existed, cannot be faulted for anything. Literally.

lengthyounarther "Liberal Hypocrite, I Rebuke thee"

Just because we don't think that democratic socialism or wellfare state, or big government, or compassionate conservative fascism, just because we don't think that that's the best type of social organization, doesn't mean we're against social organization. (...) Libertarian books (...) if nothing else, they're about the social organization and its absolute critical necessity - the division of labour, of how people interact, why it's important, why it's beneficial. Libertarians are obsessed practically with why cooperation is beneficial. But we just happen to think, that it's important, how that cooperation happens.

lengthyounarther "Liberal Hypocrite, I Rebuke thee"

The thing to notice in the New York Times article is the six degrees of separation by which libertarianism can be slandered and belittled, and dismissed, because one person knows one person, who knew one person, who could be considered racist. Classic - Ron Paul once gave Murray Rothbard a ride from an airport (...) and Rothbard at one point expressed support for David Duke, who David Duke at one point, although not longer at the point when Rothbard endorsed him, was a clan member. This, of course, means that all libertarian theory is wrong, everything that Murray Rothbard ever wrote (...) is wrong. There's nothing in there worth seeing, because he at one point for explicit political, tactical reasons expressed support for David Duke, who was formerly in the clan. Hence libertarianism is wrong.

This is why I bring out the fact, that the clan, racism and slavery, Jim Crow and the Solid South are all bastions of the Democratic Party. And we have members of the Democratic Party, who up until very recently, powerful, respected members, who were literally in the clan. The biggest example (...) is Robert C. Byrd. Robert C. Byrd was in the clan for decades. He was a Grand Cyclops. He wore the sheets. He expressed his support, voted against every black Chief Justice he could. And he gets a eulogy in The New York Times.

(...)

If Ron Paul is wrong, because Rothbard at one point supported the guy, who formerly was in the clan, then The New York Times is a fuckin' clan publication, because it's given an eulogy to a clan member.

lengthyounarther "Liberal Hypocrite, I Rebuke thee"

Interesting. Your earth people glorify organized violence for 40 centuries but you imprison those who employ it privately.

Spock ("Star Trek", episode 9)

Saying that we're gonna attack a country and kill a lot of innocent people, when we just have a guess, that it might be better, is not good enough.

Bryan Caplan

If you think of what's happening today and what FED is doing, you almost wish that Marriner Eccles would come back to life and that we could put him back in charge of the FED, because at least (...) Marriner Eccles, who was the first modern chairman of the FED in 1935, was a keynesian, no doubt, early for his time, but he was a fiscal keynesian, who actually believed that money printing was bad, that it would fuel speculation, and that if the government was going to rob the people it should do it the honest way taxes.

David Stockman "How Crony Capitalism Corrupts the Free Market"

Actually, the government has accepted no obligations to you. According to the theory the government has an obligation to protect you from criminals but according to the government it doesn't. (...) If you go to case law, if you try to sue the government for not providing some service to you, you will loose. It can be as clear as possible that the government was negligent in failing to provide a service, you will still loose. Because it is in official doctrine of the United States government, that they're not obligated to provide any service to any individual. There are cases where the police failed to protect somebody from a crime and then later they go and try to sue the police department - they always loose.

There is one exception, the one case in which according to the court the government is obligated to protect you. It's if you are in government's custody at the time. So the irony is, they're actually obligated to protect criminals (...) but they're not obligated to protect anyone else, anyone who hasn't been arrested.

Michael Huemer "The Illusion of Authority"

If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations "I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage" and "I advocate Free Trade."

Paul Krugman

Government always relies on the notion that there's a certain group of people that has the right to do things that other people don't have. (...) If you actually imagine that we have given this group of people rights to do things that are bad if anybody else does them, you are fabricating an excuse for evil. Literally, by its nature, that is what government is. Whenever you say "those guys have special rights and powers that normal people don't have", what you're saying is "those guys are allowed to do things that are bad if I do them". In other words goverment is permission to commit evil. And that is all it ever is by its very nature.

Larken Rose

If we talk about the political theory there's almost a mistaken notion on the left and the right about IP. They both accept the same wrong premise. Both the left, and the right believe the myth that intellectual property is a western capitalist property right. And for that reason the right wing supports it, and for that reason the left wing opposes it. (...) Problem is - they're both wrong. Intellectual property is not a type of property right. It actually goes against property rights. So once you recognize that (...) the right should oppose it, because it goes against property rights. The left is confused in this issue. Depends on which leftist you're talking about. The left libertarians are good on this issue, I have to say.

Stephan Kinsella

In any society an entrepreneur has to be aware of the possibility of free riders and they have to try to come up with a creative way to make a profit despite the fact of some things are being easily copyable, and some things are not.

Stephan Kinsella

I don't know if charity is always the answer. (...) You had charity all through the dark ages, all through the middle ages, people gave money to the church, the church [built] houses for the poor - didn't solve the problem of poverty. That was solved by free markets, and property rights, and free trade, and all that kind of stuff. That solved the problem of poverty. Through that wealth you get charitable opportunities that weren't there before, but fundamentally I think charity is a nice sidedish to opportunity. It's important, but (...) all it does is transfer and usually it's to a one time use. A nice thing about entrepreneurial stuff is that it creates a sustaining and self-growing economic opportunities.

Stefan Molyneux

(...) we've got two different things - we've got cooperation and we've got competition (...) The question comes down then:

- OK, let's go ahead and cooperate!
- Great!
- What's the best way to do that?
- I don't know, I think we should hold a competition to see, how we should cooperate.

And that's what capitalism is. It is a competition between different groups, that finds ways to cooperate with each other to provide a product or service in an efficient way. And the ones who cooperate better are the ones that people support. The ones that cooperate less efficiently do not get support. If you don't have a competition to see, which cooperation method is most effective, you'll never know, which one you should be using. Much more efficiency is made by having a competition to see, which cooperation method you want to use, then you would if you just said - "oh, let's just go ahead and cooperate in a willy dilly whatever fashion you would like".

Robert Kruger

When someone says - "how am I supposed to make money in a free market?", why am I obligated to answer that question? That's like someone in Russia during the height of communism saying:

- Well, I have one state toothpaste on the shelf of the grocery store right now. I have no idea what's going to happen if you liberalize the economy and free up the market. (...) Before we get rid of the communism, you need to tell me, how many brands of toothpaste we'll going to have, exactly how they're going to be provided to me and how am I going to know that they're safe. Unless you can give me that answer, we're going to keep our goddamn communist system of toothpaste.

(...) I'm sick of these questions. Your failed business model is not my goddamn problem.

Stephan Kinsella

[I think it's interesting when someone says] "libertarians have no real answers". And I think that comes from the idea that answers must come from the state. Answers to all human problems must come from state action, from laws, from regulations, from tarifs (...) So when libertarians say "the state is the problem, not the solution", people mistake that for having no answers. It's like - "well, if you don't want the state to solve a problem, then clearly you don't want the problem to be solved". And, of course, that's a complete misreading of the libertarian position.

Stefan Molyneux

Laws like minimum wage and tarifs, and pro-union legislation, and the FTA process, patents and copyrights - all these things impose some cost on large corporations but it's dispropotionally larger on smaller companies and smaller competitors.

Stephan Kinsella

(...) IP rights give to pattern-creators partial rights of control—ownership—over the tangible property of everyone else. The pattern-creator has partial ownership of others’ property, by virtue of his IP right, because he can prohibit them from performing certain actions with their own property. Author X, for example, can prohibit a third party, Y, from inscribing a certain pattern of words on Y’s own blank pages with Y’s own ink.

That is, by merely authoring an original expression of ideas, by merely thinking of and recording some original pattern of information, or by finding a new way to use his own property (recipe), the IP creator instantly, magically becomes a partial owner of others’ property. He has some say over how third parties can use their property. IP rights change the status quo by redistributing property from individuals of one class (tangible-property owners) to individuals of another (authors and inventors). Prima facie, therefore, IP law trespasses against or “takes” the property of tangible property owners, by transferring partial ownership to authors and inventors.

Stephan Kinsella "Against Intellectual Property", Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008, p.35-36

Consider the following analogy. Farmer Jed discovers oil under his land. No one for miles around knows about the black gold. Jed plans to buy his neighbors’ property for a song; they’ll sell it cheap, too, since they don’t know about the oil. In the middle of the night, his nosy neighbor Cooter (...) sneaks onto Jed’s land and discovers the truth. The next morning (...) Cooter spills his guts to Clem and the boys. One of them promptly runs to a pay phone and gives a tip to a reporter at the Wall Street Journal (...) Soon, it is common knowledge that there is oil in the vicinity. The neighbors now demand exorbitant prices for their land, thus spoiling Jed’s plans.

Let us grant that Cooter can be prosecuted for trespass and harms flowing therefrom. The question is, can Jed’s neighbors be prevented from acting on their knowledge? That is, may they be forced to somehow pretend that they do not know about the oil, and sell their land to Jed for what they “would have” sold it when in ignorance? Of course they may not be so forced. They own their land, and are entitled to use it as they see fit. Unlike tangible property, information is not ownable; it is not property. The possessor of a stolen watch may have to return it, but so long as the acquirer of knowledge does not obtain that knowledge illicitly or in violation of a contract, he is free to act upon it.

Note, however, that according to the reservation-of-rights view, the neighbors would not be permitted to act
upon their knowledge because they obtained it ultimately from Cooter, a trespasser who had no “title” to that knowledge. Thus, they could not have obtained “greater title” to it than Cooter himself had. Note also that others, such as geological surveyors mapping oil deposits, cannot include this information in their maps. They must feign ignorance until given permission by Jed.

Stephan Kinsella "Against Intellectual Property", Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008, p.54-55

(...) purchasers can be bound by contracts with sellers to not copy or even re-sell the thing. However, once third parties become aware of the ideas underlying the invention or literary work, their use of that knowledge does not, in general, violate any recognizable property rights of the seller.

Stephan Kinsella "Against Intellectual Property", Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008, p.55

The separation and retention of the right to copy from the bundle of rights that we call property is problematic. Could one reserve the right, for example, to remember something? Suppose that I wrote a book and offered it to you to read, but I had retained one right: the right to remember it. Would I be justified in taking you to court if I could prove that you had remembered the name of the lead character in the book?

Tom G. Palmer "Are patents and copyrights morally justified?", "Information Ethics. Privacy, Property, and Power", 2005, p.853

(...) the IP advocate must propose some homesteading rule along the following lines: “A person who comes up with some useful or creative idea which can guide or direct an actor in the use of his own tangible property thereby instantly gains a right to control all other tangible property in the world, with respect to that property’s similar use.” This new-fangled homesteading technique is so powerful that it gives the creator rights in third parties’ already owned tangible property.

Stephan Kinsella "Against Intellectual Property", Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008, p.43-44

The most radical of all IP proponents is Andrew Joseph Galambos (...) Galambos reportedly took his own ideas to ridiculous lengths, claiming a property right in his own ideas and requiring his students not to repeat them dropping a nickel in a fund box every time he used the word “liberty,” as a royalty to the descendants of Thomas Paine, the alleged “inventor” of the word “liberty”; and changing his original name from Joseph Andrew Galambos (Jr., presumably) to Andrew Joseph Galambos, to avoid infringing his identically-named father’s rights to the name.

Stephan Kinsella "Against Intellectual Property", Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008, p.26-27

Property rights must be demonstrably just, as well as visible, because they cannot serve their function of preventing conflict unless they are acceptable as fair by those affected by the rules.

Stephan Kinsella "Against Intellectual Property", Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008, p.30

One problem with the creation-based approach is that it almost invariably protects only certain types of creations (...) Both the inventor and the theoretical scientist engage in creative mental effort to produce useful, new ideas. Yet one is rewarded, and the other is not. In one recent case, the inventor of a new way to calculate a number representing the shortest path between two points—an extremely useful technique—was not given patent protection because this was “merely” a mathematical algorithm. But it is arbitrary and unfair to reward more practical inventors and entertainment providers, such as the engineer and songwriter, and to leave more theoretical science and math researchers and philosophers unrewarded. The distinction is inherently vague, arbitrary, and unjust.

Stephan Kinsella "Against Intellectual Property", Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008, p.23-25

Favoring a minimal state that only does what you want it to do is like letting rattlesnakes loose in your house with the hope that they will only bite mice but never threaten people.

Jeffrey Tucker (supposedly)

Marx declined Engels's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.

Paul Johnson "Intellectuals", Harper Perennial, 1992, p.60

[Karl Marx] came across many instances of low-paid workers but he never succeeded in unearthing one who was paid literally no wages at all. Yet such a worker did exist, in his own household. (...) This was Helen Demuth, known in the family as 'Lenchen'. Born in 1823, of peasant stock, she had joined the von Westphalen family at the age of eight as a nursery-maid. She got her keep but was paid nothing. In 1845 the Baroness, who felt sorrow and anxiety for her married daughter, gave Lenchen, then twenty-two, to Jenny Marx to ease her lot. She remained in the Marx family until her death in 1890. (...) She was a ferociously hard worker, not only cooking and scrubbing but managing the family budget, which Jenny was incapable of handling. Marx never paid her a penny.

Paul Johnson "Intellectuals", Harper Perennial, 1992, p.79

To me property means the right to give permission or to deny permission to others to use this thing. That's all. (...) The right to property can't be a right to use, because if it meant the right to use, then you could shoot your gun at someone elses body.

Stephan Kinsella

In Argentina you can shoot coco leaves and it's quite socially accepted and very pleasant actually.

Doug Casey

[Bill Hicks said] that if any president ever did something like Ron Paul, the very first day he gets elected he would be called into the back room, bunch of guys would come in in the black suites and they would put on the projector and they'd show him the JFK's assasination from the angle you've never seen before.

Jeff Berwick

One of the main things that I do is I live a permanent traveller or prior taxpayer theory lifestyle called PT. And if you live that way you can essentially make it so that you don't have to pay tax anywhere, because you're not really a citizen or resident of any one country. And you try to choose to be a resident of a country that doesn't have any tax. There's a number of countries like that. Because of that I don't have to pay any tax anywhere - all legally. I live in Mexico as a tourist. I would never be resident or citizen here, because you never want to live where you're a citizen, because then they own you. While if you live somewhere as a tourist, they really treasure you.

Jeff Berwick

In Chile the economy is booming. If you haven't been down there, you won't believe what's going on. It's starting to look like Hong Kong, because the government is quite libertarian. (...) They don't even have a keynesian central bank. They are more of a Chicago School - they do print money, but they actually adjust every year the price of the peso to the inflation rate.

Jeff Berwick

You know what I love about these people that say that if you leave the US, you're a coward? They're usually constitutionalist types, Tea Party types. I like to point out that all the Founding Fathers of the US fled the UK, because of the oppressive government which was like two percent tax at that time and go to the US.

Jeff Berwick

You want your invention to yourself? Then keep it to yourself.

Benjamin Tucker "Liberty, Vol. 7, No. 22"

Sometimes I find it just laughable - the extent to which all states sort of live in the past, all states are nation states. And we are living in a global economic environment with global communication as never before. People don't care about these borders and the states are stuck in regulating these increasingly irrelevant units.

Jeffrey Tucker

(...) the real reason [of increasing wealth inequality in the Western world] is the enormous expansion of the world supply of unskilled and semi-skilled labour brought about by falling transport costs and trade barriers. With globalization, a billion or more rural people in Asia could be recruited into the urban industrial sector and produce the tradeable goods that undersell the goods hitherto produced in the United States and Europe. Until this new Asian labour is wholly absorbed and its wages rise to Western levels, U.S. and European unskilled wages will remain depressed and the share of profits in value added will rise. Ironically, while this sharpens inequality in the West, it promotes equality on a world scale as Asian and eventually also African peoples are lifted out of misery.

Anthony de Jasay "The Price of Everything"

[Mises criticises Oswald Spengler] for this polylogist view that people have different sorts of logic and different patterns of thinking. For example, Spengler held that the Greeks had a completely different view of space and time from that characteristic of western man. Greeks didn't have the notion of infinity. (...) Mises asks the basic question - if these cultures are supposed to be different, they have all these very different ways of looking at the past and they have different kinds of thought, how is it that Spengler himself is able to understand all these different patterns? He's limited to his own culture - that of contemporary western man. So how is it, on his own system, that he's able to understand all these different cultures?

David Gordon "Theory and History"

[Josiah Warren] tried to test his solution to state-controlled banking: namely, private currency, the right of every individual to issue his or her own money to anyone who was willing to take it. He believed that the issuance of private currency would destroy the perceived injustice of "interest."

To test this theory, Warren opened a retail store called the Time Store, from which he issued "labor dollars." In 1827, the store opened with $300 worth of groceries and dry goods that were offered at 7 percent markup from his cost in order to cover "contingent expenses." Where he made his profit was in selling his labor to customers by requiring them to pay for the time it took him to effect the transfer of goods — that time consisted of the initial purchasing of the good and then its sale. Remember, this was before groceries were prepackaged and preweighed and at a time when it was customary to bargain with the shopkeeper rather than merely to pay a posted price.

In fact, one of Warren's innovations was to post prices for goods. The customer would then pay the price of the goods in traditional money and then compensate Warren for his time with a labor note that promised to give back to him an equivalent amount of time in the buyer's occupation. If the buyer were a plumber, for example, the labor note committed him to render his services to Warren for "x" time units of plumbing work.

Warren's goal was to divorce the price of the goods from the compensation he received — in other words, to establish an economy in which his profit was based on the exchange of time and labor. And, to some degree, he succeeded. A thriving barter community arose and spread outside the radical community, with regular people coming from a hundred miles away to avail themselves of Warren's low prices. Having succeeded, however, he closed the store, because its entire purpose had been to test the theory.

Wendy McElroy "American Anarchism"

I care nothing for any reform that cannot be effected right here in Boston among the every day people whom I meet in the streets.

Benjamin Tucker "Liberty, Vol. 2, No. 21"

[I think an appropriate fountainhead for the libertarian tradition] is Josiah Warren, whom the historian James J. Martin believes was the first person to adopt the label anarchist.

Josiah Warren began his radical career as a follower of the socialist and communitarian Robert Owen. Warren was one of the original participants in the famous New Harmony community that began in 1826, and he saw firsthand what was wrong with the organizing principle of socialist communities. After decades and decades of discussion by utopian planners — both in England and America — New Harmony put their theories to the test. Warren saw how quickly a practical test made their schemes deteriorate into folly. It took less than a year and a half for New Harmony to dissolve. Warren blamed the community's failure on its denial of personal-property rights, on the demand for communal property that stifled all individual initiative.

Wendy McElroy "American Anarchism"

I think one of the saddest aspects of modern libertarianism is that it has surrendered or ignored its own history and thus surrendered its rightful claim to being the true ideology of the working class — a claim that would go a long way toward dispelling an accusation commonly hurled at libertarianism: namely, that it represents only the interests of business. There is no way to look at 19th-century individualist anarchism and sustain that accusation.

Wendy McElroy "American Anarchism"

Two of the most powerful forces that have shaped the reality and the history of everyone in this room are profoundly ideological — Christianity and Marxism. From these two examples alone, it seems impossible to deny the power of ideology as a force in human history.

Wendy McElroy "American Anarchism"

[Voters] say to the person thus designated:

Go to A— B—, and say to him that “the government” has need of money to meet the expenses of protecting him and his property. If he presumes to say that he has never contracted with us to protect him, and that he wants none of our protection, say to him that that is our business, and not his; that we choose to protect him, whether he desires us to do so or not; and that we demand pay, too, for protecting him. If he dares to inquire who the individuals are, who have thus taken upon themselves the title of “the government,” and who assume to protect him, and demand payment of him, without his having ever made any contract with them, say to him that that, too, is our business, and not his; that we do not choose to make ourselves individually known to him; that we have secretly (by secret ballot) appointed you our agent to give him notice of our demands, and, if he complies with them, to give him, in our name, a receipt that will protect him against any similar demand for the present year. If he refuses to comply, seize and sell enough of his property to pay not only our demands, but all your own expenses and trouble beside. If he resists the seizure of his property, call upon the bystanders to help you (doubtless some of them will prove to be members of our band). If, in defending his property, he should kill any of our band who are assisting you, capture him at all hazards; charge him (in one of our courts) with murder, convict him, and hang him. If he should call upon his neighbors, or any others who, like him, may be disposed to resist our demands, and they should come in large numbers to his assistance, cry out that they are all rebels and traitors; that “our country” is in danger; call upon the commander of our hired murderers; tell him to quell the rebellion and “save the country,” cost what it may. Tell him to kill all who resist, though they should be hundreds of thousands; and thus strike terror into all others similarly disposed. See that the work of murder is thoroughly done, that we may have no further trouble of this kind hereafter. When these traitors shall have thus been taught our strength and our determination, they will be good loyal citizens for many years, and pay their taxes without a why or a wherefore.

Lysander Spooner "No Treason. No. VI. The Constitution of No Authority"

(...) men’s voluntary support of the Constitution is doubtless, in most cases, wholly contingent upon the question whether, by means of the Constitution, they can make themselves masters, or are to be made slaves.

Lysander Spooner "No Treason. No. VI. The Constitution of No Authority"

Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby ameliorating their condition. But it would not therefore be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or ever consented to.

Lysander Spooner "No Treason. No. II. The Constitution"

I don't think I'm an alcoholic though it sounds like a great life

Jeffrey Tucker

The people don't control government; the elites control government. Everything that gives government more power only gives the elites more power at the expense of the people.

Jeffrey Tucker

Civil disorder leads to more government, not less. It may topple one government, but it creates a situation in which people desire another and stronger. Hitler's regime followed the chaos of the Weimar years. Russian communism is a second example, a lesson for which the anarchists of Kronstadt paid dear. Napoleon is a third. Yet many radicals, and some anarchists, talk and act as though civil disruption were the road to freedom. For those radicals whose vision of freedom is a new government run by themselves, revolution is not a totally unreasonable strategy, although they may be overly optimistic in thinking that they are the ones who will end up on top. For those of us whose enemy is not the government but government itself, it is a strategy of suicide.

David Friedman "Machinery of Freedom"

[Austrians want to understand] the ways in which the macro disturbances, disturbances of money and the interest rate reveal themselves, manifest in the marketplace. Not as a movements of macro aggregates but as movements in micro indicators, the movements in prices specifically. And it's that the way in which those macro factors affect microeconomic prices, that lead to the discoordination. So that ultimately in some sense, even though I'm not gonna argue - "there is a meaningful thing called austrian macroeconomics", in some sense everything ultimately boils down to prices. Everything ultimately boils down to microeconomic market prices.

Steve Horwitz "Monetary Equilibrium Theory"

The trouble of a silver standard or a gold standard, even with a fractional reserve system, is that if something that happens in the outside world unpredictably changes the value of silver or gold, you will suddenly change the value of all long term contracts. (...) So the ideal system from my standpoint uses what refers to as commodity bundle. That when my bank goes into the existence, we say - you bring in a million Friedman dollars, we will give you a ton of graded steel plus five hundred bushels of grade B wheat plus two ounces of gold plus... You would have some list of commodities and the bundles what you would redeem. (...) And now since it's very unlikely that all of those different commodities will change their value at the same time, you have something which is more stable, which gives you more consistent, predictable value for the money than any single commodity.

David Friedman

I think it would be odd to say that macroeconomics only is relevant to what government does, because it's relevant to understanding the world. Suppose you had a really good theory of macroeconomics, which let you make predictions about what happenned next year. Well, if you predict that next year there will be higher unemployment, that might be a good reason not to quit your job this year, for example. That would be an example of a perfectly private decision affected by your macroeconomics predictions.

David Friedman

I only ever took one economics course in college, the one they make engineers take. I liked it and was frustrated at the same time. At the time I was already Hazlitt-aware, and so the Phillips Curve .... I sensed something was up. That says that there is an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation: the more inflation you have, the more employment; if you increase employment, you have more inflation. If you want to have low inflation, you have to have high unemployment.

I remember I raised my hand, the smartass EE libertarian, and I was like, "whoa whoa whoa. So are you telling me, if some space aliens descend on the earth tonight, and execute every unemployed adult, so that when we wake up tomorrow tens of millions of unemployed people are dead--that this would make inflation go *up*, all of a sudden?"

(...)

Maybe my brain is just not wired to understand "sophisticated" economics. But I don't recall ever hearing a good response to my objection.

Stephan Kinsella

"Human action is purposeful behavior". It's from this undeniable fact that all of praxeology as a science is deduced. This fact or axiom is undeniable because (...) if you try to deny that human action is purposeful, you'd be acting purposefully yourself.

Praxgirl "Episode 2 - Methodology"

Paul Samuelson, author probably the most widely read over the decade. Published since 1948 in something like twenty English language editions, heaven knows how many non-English language editions. Timing not so great - 1989:

The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many sceptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.

It is vital, folks, it is vital (...) to laugh at the mainstream. They talk about their predictions but the biggest prediction of the 20th century they're four square, full-set, dead-set wrong.

Chris Leithner "The Science of Human Action"

It is a great fault of symbolic pseudo-mathematical methods of formalising a system of economic analysis (...) Too large a proportion of recent “mathematical” economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

John Maynard Keynes "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money"

I ought to mention the type of liberty that I assume libertarians to be defending. It is a kind of interpersonal liberty. In particular, it is about people being unconstrained by other people’s interferences, or invasions, or aggressions, or trespasses, or—as I prefer to theorize it—it is about the absence of proactively imposed costs, ultimately in a prepropertarian sense.

J. C. Lester - A Critical Commentary on Walter Block's "David Friedman and Libertarianism: A Critique" and a Comparison with J. C. Lester's Responses to Friedman

[Rothbard] recognized that setting the limits of harm is matter of convention, settled by the understanding that prevails in a society. Zwolinski (...) falls into a mistake that many libertarians make. They deny a role to convention in delimiting the boundaries for the application of a concept: unless “nature” settles the matter, use of a concept is an all-or-nothing affair.

David Gordon "In Defense of Non-Aggression"

Here's the situation. You're standing on the deck of 25th floor and the deck caves in and you go down, down, down the building. Then you grab onto the 15th floor and now you're on the 15th floor and what you really want to do is go into the apartment and get onto the staircase and go up back to your party and not go out on the deck again. And there's a flag pole on the 15th floor and you're crawling down the flag pole and trying to get into this person's house. And this person comes out with a gun and says - "that's private property, you're a trespasser, get off. The issue is not what should you do. That's not a libertarian question. The libertarian question is - if that person shoots you for trespassing, are they a murderer? And my claim is that they're not.

Walter Block "Does Spanking Violate the Non-Aggression Principle?"

[There are kinds of errors which are] characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens. 

Richard Feynman "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"

The Non-aggression Principle really isn't the essence of libertarianism. The essence of it is, I think, the punishment theory.

Walter Block "Does Spanking Violate the Non-Aggression Principle?"

“What would you think of someone who said, ‘I would like to have a cat, provided it barked’? Yet your statement that you favor an FDA, provided it behaves as you believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The biological laws that specify the characteristics of cats are no more rigid than the political laws that specify the behavior of governmental agencies once they are established. The way the FDA now behaves, and the adverse consequences, are not an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a consequence of its constitution.

Milton Friedman "Barking Cats"

Having been an econ major, studying economics, my first inclination was always to think about the advocacy or efficiency aspects of all sort of things. And someone finally pointed out to me that what ethics is about, it's about constraints, by which you may first rule out certain actions and then you may take the allowable set and think about the effectiveness of those in whatever goal you might have in mind.

Scott Olmsted "Mapping the Ethical Minefield"

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

Thomas Jefferson

Minarchists are in no position to limit the state themselves. No one has the power to centrally plan anything, much less dictate the size and scale and functions of government. Minarchists can believe what they want but the view that the state should be limited to that or that function is nonoperational in practice.

Jeffrey Tucker

A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’.

If Sweden’s Big Welfare State Is Superior to America’s Medium Welfare State, then Why Do Swedes in America Earn Far More than Swedes in Sweden?

Bureaucrats follow laws until they decide to break them. And the thing we need to do is use mathematics to make sure that bureaucrat can't break the law.

Jacob Appelbaum

To me it's absurd that you would be to ask for a permission to carry a gun. In fact if you have to ask for permission for something then it's not a right. It's a privilege.

lengthyounarther "Constitutional Carry"

We don't have a law against monopoly in America. We have a law against monopolizing. (...) Nothing can be in fact more competitive than attempting to monopolize the market. You can argue that's why the anti-trust laws has been used so perversely. (...) they're using the laws against the most competitive firms in this sense that they've been trying to monopolize markets, which is a very competitive process.

Dominick Armentano "Competition, Monopoly, and Antitrust"

To give you an example of YAF spirit those days (...) There was a small libertarian contingent. This was beginning the libertarian-conservative alliance. (...) They suggested the term "Young Americans for Freedom". The trads, who were in majority, traditionalists, said - no, no, we can't use the word "freedom", because it's a commie word. To me it sort of summarizes the right wing from now on. "Freedom is a commie word."

Murray Rothbard

[Keynes] told Hayek at the end of his life that if business cycles went to far with inflation and public dept, he can always change things around, he can just snap his finger and everything would shift. Unfortunately, Keynes died and left us with his long run.

Murray Rothbard "Keynes the Man: Hero or Villain?"

Aggregates, sums, averages, which statistics offer you, are no substitute for the detailed knowledge of every single price in relation to each other which really guide economic activity. That's a mistaken attempt to overcome our limited knowledge.

Friedrich Hayek

In one respect Milton Friedman is still a keynesian - not on monetary theory, but on methodology. Keynes, very much against his own intensions, decided the victory of what's called macroeconomics. And it still dominates economic theory. Milton Friedman is one of the apostols of macroeconomics. (...) His theory is based on supposed regularities between statistic magnitudes. He's convinced and to believed that he historically demonstrated that there's a simple relation between the total quantity of money and the price level. (...) Nobody knows what "total quantity of money" is. Money has so many different meanings. (...) It's now fifty years that I once said in affect, that one of the greatest misfortunes that could happen in the field of economics is if people ever seized to believe in the quantity theory of money... except that should ever come to be taken literally.

Friedrich Hayek

This then is a face F. A. Hayek will present to the world in his "Constitution of Liberty". It is a face such that if I were a young man first getting interested in political questions and I should read this as the very best product of the extreme right, I would become a roaring leftist in no time, and so I believe would almost anyone.

Murray Rothbard

If you ground an economic science on the fact that people choose and you're looking at their action, the only thing you can ever demostrate with action, is that something is better than another. If I pick A over B we can't say - "oh, he valued A 16% more" or "it gave him 16% more utils than B". All you know is A was more valuable, was higher on his preference ranking than B was.

Robert Murphy "The Revolutionary Promise of Austrian Economics Education"

[Mises] didn't believe in natural rights. What he did, and this is a very characteristic thing you will find in his writtings, he would try to take the premise that the opponent of free market had and show that the free market would better fulfill whatever it was that the opponent of the free market favored.

David Gordon "Everyday Logic of Economics"