The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.
LUDWIG VON MISESPrivate 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.
More Ludwig von Mises Quotes
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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 -
A new type of superstition has got hold of people’s minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!
LUDWIG VON MISES -
The 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.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
[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
LUDWIG VON MISES -
He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.
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They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.
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 first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
They can open the way to credit expansion by the banks. They can thus create an artificial boom and the appearance of prosperity. But such a boom is bound to collapse soon or late and to bring about a depression.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
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 worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
A 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.
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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.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion.
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Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation.
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He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.
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A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.
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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 -
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.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned.
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.
LUDWIG VON MISES -
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 essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.
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This is what capitalism, the much abused profit system, has brought about and brings about daily anew. Yet, most present-day governments and political parties are eager to destroy this system.
LUDWIG VON MISES