Rothbard on money

"To save our economy from destruction and from the eventual holocaust of run away inflation, we the people must take the money-supply function back from the government. Money is far too important to be left in the hands of bankers and of Establishment economists and financiers. To accomplish this goal, money must be returned to the market economy, with all monetary functions performed within the structure of the rights of private property and of the free-market economy."
Murray Rothbard
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard200.html

"The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself."
James Wolcott

The learning of not to know

Friedrich A. Hayek (1988, 76):
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little
they really know about what they imagine they can design."

Heroes and other mortals

"There are two broad theories concerning the great men of history. One says that history is made by great men. The other says great men are made by history. But we think they’re both wrong. In our book, great men don’t really exist. They are merely invented by the historians. History needs heroes. Sometimes tragic heroes… sometimes comic… the historians take what they’ve got to work with and set them spinning. But if you look at their leading characters closely, they look little different from the rest of us… just fellow passengers on the big bus."
Bill Bonner
http://www.lewrockwell.com/bonner/bonner380.html

Laissez-faire banking

RF: Describe free banking. How does it differ from the sort of system we have in the United States today?
Selgin: I use the term to mean laissez-faire banking — banking without any special government regulations or restrictions. Like free trade, it’s an ideal concept. It doesn’t refer to any specific or actual banking system, although some, like Scotland’s in the early 19th century, came close.
My own ideal version of free banking would have no special requirements for note issuance. Private banks would be able to issue their own notes on the same basis as they create demand deposits. They would also be free to open branches and invest in all kinds of securities. Finally, there wouldn’t be any sort of implicit or explicit government guarantees, like deposit insurance.

Full text: http://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/region_focus/2009/winter/full_interview.cfm

Autonomy

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The choice

"When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock; when you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz."
-- Doug Newman