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 MISESA society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
More Ludwig von Mises Quotes
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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.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.
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The struggle for freedom is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities, sometimes of a minority of but one man gainst the majority.
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The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
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To the masses, the catchwords of Socialism sound so enticing… so they will continue to work for Socialism, helping thereby to bring about the inevitable decline of the civilization which the nations of the West have taken thousands of years to build up.
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Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes.
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They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent.
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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 -
For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people.
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Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes.
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They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.
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For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.
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The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.
LUDWIG VON MISES