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Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
Important economist, most important member of the Austrian School, known for analyzing the fatal flaws of Socialism and predicting the economic fall of Soviet Russia.
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.
This, then, is freedom in the external life of man — that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.
Government is the only institution that can take a perfectly good piece of paper, print some noble words on it, and make it perfectly worthless.
The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.
Planned Chaos p28
If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.
Planning for Freedom p44
The salesman thanks the customer for patronizing his shop and asks him to come again. But the socialists say: Be grateful to Hitler, render thanks to Stalin; be nice and submissive, then the great man will be kind to you later too.
Omnipotent Government p53
There is really no essential difference between the unlimited power of the democratic state and the unlimited power of the autocrat.
Socialism pp. 64-65
Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty.
Human Action p. 283 and 285
It is in the nature of the men handling the apparatus of compulsion and coercion to overrate its power to work, and to strive at subduing all spheres of human life to its immediate influence.
Omnipotent Government p. 58
He who disdains the fall in infant mortality and the gradual disappearance of famines and plagues may cast the first stone upon the materialism of the economists.
The meaning of economic freedom is this: that the individual is in a position to choose the way in which he wants to integrate himself into the totality of society.
Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
Government is beating into submission, imprisoning, and killing...The authority of man-made law is entirely due to weapons of the constables who enforce obedience to its provisions.
The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot.
The philosophy called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus.
Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's success as a means for the attainment of his own.
Society is only possible on these terms, that the individual finds therein a strengthening of his own ego and his own will.
The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.
As society is only possible if everyone, while living his own life, at the same time helps others to live; if every individual is simultaneously means and end; if each individual's well-being is simultaneously the condition necessary to the well-being of others, it is evident that the contrast between I and thou, means and end, automatically is overcome.
No wonder that all who have had something new to offer humanity have had nothing good to say of the state or its laws.
[T]he essence of so-called war prosperity; it enriches some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income.
He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.
Government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. 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.
[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.
It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine’s correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconsciousness convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.
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