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Money is different from all other commodities: other things being equal, more shoes, or more discoveries of oil or copper benefit society, since they help alleviate natural scarcity. But once a commodity is established as a money on the market, no more money at all is needed. Since the only use of money is for exchange and reckoning, more dollars or pounds or marks in circulation cannot confer a social benefit: they will simply dilute the exchange value of every existing dollar or pound or mark.
Murray Rothbard
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Money, unlike other commodities, does not provide additional benefits when increased in quantity; it merely reduces its own value.

Murray Rothbard highlights the unique nature of money compared to other goods. While increasing the supply of shoes or resources like oil offers tangible benefits to society by helping to meet demand, adding more money to the economy does not similarly improve conditions. Instead, it leads to inflation, diminishing the value of existing currency. Essentially, money serves only as a medium for exchange, and its increase without a corresponding increase in goods and services dilutes its value and can lead to economic instability rather than prosperity.

Themes

MoneyInflationValueEconomicsExchange

In practice

Example use cases

During a finance lecture discussing the impact of inflation on purchasing power.

More from Murray Rothbard

Human life is not some sort of race or game in which each person should start from an identical mark. It is an attempt by each man to be as happy as possible. And each person could not begin from the same point, for the world has not just come into being; it is diverse and infinitely varied in its parts. The mere fact that one individual is necessarily born in a different place from someone else immediately insures that his inherited opportunity cannot be the same as his neighbor's.
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Ultimately, there is no entity called 'government'; there are only people forming themselves into groups called 'governments' and acting in a 'governmental' manner.
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In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve the consumers; in government, the fittest are those most adept at wielding coercion and/or those most adroit at making demagogic appeals to the voting public.
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The 'boom-bust' cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business.
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No one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.
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If government manages to establish paper tickets or bank credit as money, as equivalent to gold grams or ounces, then the government, as dominant money-supplier, becomes free to create money costlessly and at will. As a result, this 'inflation' of the money supply destroys the value of the dollar or pound, drives up prices, cripples economic calculation, and hobbles and seriously damages the workings of the market economy.
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