Jörg Guido Hülsmann Quotes

Ultimately we need to take control over the money supply out of the hands of our governments and make the production of money again subject to the principle of free association. The first step to endorsing and promoting this strategy is to realize that governments do not--indeed cannot--fulfill any positive role whatever through the control of our money.

In the mainstream conception, the development of the market economy inevitably goes hand in hand with a decline of generosity and altruism. Indifference and coldheartedness rear their ugly heads. Rugged individualism reigns supreme when the state is small or inactive. By contrast, a large and active state is bound to provide the population with the numerous and substantial gratuitous benefits of the welfare state. And, of course, such a large and active state is also likely to promote economic growth through expansionary fiscal and monetary policy... This conception is the exact opposite of the truth. It is a fairy tale of statist propaganda. The truth is that generosity and abundance flourish in a free economy. When such an economy grows, there is actually a powerful tendency for generosity to increase more than aggregate output. But government interventions, most notably expansionary monetary policies, annihilate and invert these tendencies. They create very strong incentives for people to become stingy, selfish, and indifferent. And for analogous reasons, the services provided by the welfare state in the long run never solve any of the problems they were supposed to mend. They always end up reinforcing and perpetuating homelessness, illiteracy, sickness, unemployment, violence, dependence, indifference, and despair. In other words, state-provided gratuitousness is not only sterile but positively harmful, the exact opposite of the gratuitous goods provided by free and responsible citizens.