The Economics of Liberty Quotes

“One of the ironic but unfortunately enduring legacies of the eight years of Reaganism has been the resurrection of Keynesianism...”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., The Economics of Liberty

“(...) wages are not arbitrary; they are set by the market. Along with the prices of all factors of production, wages are reflections of how badly consumers want the product or service in question versus all other products and services in the market. A firm cannot pay workers more than their contribution if it is to stay in business. If the law requires it, some workers will be paid more only at the expense of others who will be paid not at all. The law will have distributed wealth not from business to labor, but from one set of workers to another. This is presumably not what the idealistic proponents of mandated benefits had in mind.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., The Economics of Liberty

“(...) With the $260 billion that government and consumers have spent on farm subsidies since 1980, the government could have bought every farm, barn, and tractor in 33 states. The average American head of household worked almost one week a year in 1986 and 1987 simply to pay for welfare for fewer than a million farmers.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., The Economics of Liberty

“We can see matters particularly clearly if we rely on M-A (for Austrian), rather than on the various Ms issued by the Fed which are statistical artifacts devoid of real meaning. After increasing rapidly for several years, the money supply remained flat from April to August 1987, long enough to help precipitate the great stock market crash of October. Then, M-A rose by about 2.5% per year, increasing from $1,905 billion in August 1987 to $1,948 billion in July 1988. Since July, however, this modest increase has been reversed, and the money supply remained level until the end of the year, then fell sharply to $1,897 billion by the end of January 1989. From the middle of 1988, then, until the end of January 1989, the total money supply, M-A, fell in absolute terms by no less than an annual rate of 5.2%. The last time M-A fell that sharply was in 1979–80, precipitating the last great recession.

This is not an argument for the Fed to expand money again in panic. Quite the contrary. Once an inflationary boom is launched, a recession is not only inevitable but is also the only way of correcting the distortions of the boom and returning the economy to health. The quicker a recession comes the better, and the more it is allowed to perform its corrective work, the sooner full recovery will arrive.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., The Economics of Liberty