The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.
LUDWIG VON MISESThe planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.
More Ludwig von Mises Quotes
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There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility.
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True, governments can reduce the rate of interest in the short run. They can issue additional paper money.
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[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics
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A free press can only exist where there is private control over the means of production
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The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by governments.
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The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy.
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None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hangs on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.
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The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
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The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial-that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and ultimately all intellectual and material progress are rooted.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.
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Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.
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The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction.
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Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.
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The first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.
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Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
The main propoganda trick of supporters of the allegedly “progressive” policy of government control is to blame capitalism for all that is unsatisfactory in present-day conditions and to extol the blessings of socialism. They have never attempted to prove their fallacious dogmas.
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Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.
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In such vital matters blind reliance upon ‘experts’ and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and to yielding to other people’s domination.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
The interventionists do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
Unemployment doles can have no other effect than the perpetuation of unemployment.
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It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.
LUDWIG VON MISES