Roland Baader Quote: Why the Market Economy Secures Our Freedom

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot. “Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.’ “When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are." Ayn Rand

"There was this wonderful book called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and there's a chapter in it where there's a planet where another planet sends all of its lunatics to do no more damage at home. And on this lunatic planet, the Keynesian economists have come to power and decided that they can abolish the scarcity of goods by abolishing the scarcity of money. They then declared the leaves of trees to be money, which of course immediately led to hyperinflation. This was then countered with a forest defoliation program. And let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, some of these "foliage faction" have made it here. They're sitting in the central banking worlds today, in the Governing Council of the ECB and at the Fed, and they're telling us with their Modern Monetary Theory that it's possible in all seriousness to overcome the scarcity of goods by abolishing the scarcity of money and being able to buy everything, anything, everything, if we just print enough money." Markus Krall