Drawing on the writings of both Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, one finds the case against the national debt rests on economic, moral, and political arguments.

Mises and Rothbard emphasize that government borrowing is a form of intervention that distorts the natural allocation of capital. In Human Action, Mises explains that government debt competes with private investment, diverting resources from productive uses to politically determined projects. This leads to capital misallocation and economic inefficiency, harming long-term economic growth.

Rothbard, in Man, Economy, and State and America's Great Depression, expands on this by pointing out that government spending is inherently wasteful because it is driven by political incentives rather than market discipline. He argues that debt-financed spending exacerbates this problem by postponing the immediate economic pain of taxation while still consuming resources that could have gone to private enterprise.

For both Mises and Rothbard, government borrowing is a tool for expanding state power. Mises, in Bureaucracy and Omnipotent Government, warns that a growing state necessarily restricts individual freedoms. He contends that deficit spending allows governments to increase their reach without the immediate backlash of higher taxes, thus enabling interventions that would otherwise face stronger opposition.

Rothbard takes this argument further in Power and Market, arguing that the national debt is effectively a hidden tax on future generations. Since borrowing allows current politicians to spend money without immediate taxation, it encourages irresponsible fiscal policies and perpetual government expansion. As he puts it, "deficits are simply deferred taxation," and since debt must be repaid with future taxation or inflation, it represents an unjust claim on future labor and wealth.

Another major problem Mises and Rothbard identify is that government debt often leads to inflation. Mises, in The Theory of Money and Credit, explains how central banks monetize debt by purchasing government bonds, increasing the money supply and reducing the purchasing power of money. This inflationary process acts as a stealth tax, transferring wealth from savers and wage earners to the state and its beneficiaries.