Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “What economic calculation requires is a monetary system whose functioning is not sabotaged by government interference.”

— Ludwig von Mises

252. “You call it a ‘loophole’ when the government still allows you some freedom.”

— Ludwig von Mises

253. “Everything brought forward in favor of Socialism during the last hundred years, in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make socialism workable.”

— Ludwig von Mises

254. “There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.”

— Ludwig von Mises

255. “Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.”

— Ludwig von Mises

256. “Business is a means- the only means- to increase the quantity of goods available for preserving life and rendering it more agreeable.”

— Ludwig von Mises

257. “Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit the state and its influence most strictly.”

— Ludwig von Mises

258. “Freedom and liberty always mean freedom from police interference.”

— Ludwig von Mises

259. “Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society, nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society. The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears.”

— Ludwig von Mises

260. “Socialism in Russia has not brought about an improvement in the conditions of the average man which can be compared with the improvement of conditions, during the same period, in the United States.”

— Ludwig von Mises

261. “Human actions consist always in a choice between two goods or two evils which are not deemed equivalent. Where there is perfect equivalence, man stays neutral; and no action results. But what is good and what is better, or what is bad and what is worse, is decided according to subjective standards, different with different individuals, and changing with the same individuals according to circumstances. As.”

— Ludwig von Mises

262. “A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital unit per unit of its population.”

— Ludwig von Mises

263. “In spite of the anticapitalistic policies of all governments and of almost all political parties, the capitalist mode of production.”

— Ludwig von Mises

264. “Inflation is essentially antidemocratic.”

— Ludwig von Mises

265. “No architect is held responsible for the behavior of those who inhabit the structure he designed.”

— Ludwig von Mises

266. “Two hundred years ago, before the advent of capitalism, a man’s social status was fixed from the beginning to the end of his life; he inherited it from his ancestors and it never changed.”

— Ludwig von Mises

267. “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 subconscious convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.”

— Ludwig von Mises

268. “Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.”

— Ludwig von Mises

269. “Under the gold standard gold is money and money is gold. It is immaterial whether or not the laws assign legal tender quality only to gold coins minted by the government.”

— Ludwig von Mises

270. “The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.”

— Ludwig von Mises

271. “As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individuals mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest details.”

— Ludwig von Mises

272. “Only the naive inflationist’s could believe that government could enrich mankind through fiat money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

273. “There is not the slightest analogy between playing games and the conduct of business within a market society. The card player wins money by outsmarting his antagonist. The businessman makes money by supplying customers with goods they want to acquire.”

— Ludwig von Mises

274. “Some think that they will exercise power for the general good, but that is what all those with power have believed. Power is evil in itself, regardless of who exercises it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

275. “Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that.”

— Ludwig von Mises

276. “Government is an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.”

— Ludwig von Mises

277. “It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor.”

— Ludwig von Mises

278. “Fortunes cannot grow; someone has to increase them.”

— Ludwig von Mises

279. “Where there is no market economy, the best intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.”

— Ludwig von Mises

280. “Anticapitalism can maintain itself in existence only by sponging on capitalism.”

— Ludwig von Mises

281. “It is evident that youth is the first victim of the trend toward bureaucratization. The young men are deprived of any opportunity to shape their own fate.”

— Ludwig von Mises

282. “On the unhampered market there prevails an irresistible tendency to employ every factor of production for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers. If the government interfered with this process, it can only impair satisfaction; it can never improve it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

283. “Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.”

— Ludwig von Mises

284. “The tricks and artifices of advertising are available to the seller of the better product no less than to the seller of the poorer product. But only the former enjoys the advantage derived from the better quality of his product.”

— Ludwig von Mises

285. “This civilization was able to spring into existence because the peoples were dominated by ideas which were the application of the teachings of economics to the problems of economic policy. It will and must perish if the nations continue to pursue the course which they entered upon under the spell of doctrines rejecting economic thinking.”

— Ludwig von Mises

286. “A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. 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.”

— Ludwig von Mises

287. “Speculation does not determine prices; it has to accept the prices that are determined in the market. I ts efforts are directed to correctly estimating future price-situations, and to acting accordingly. The influence of speculation cannot alter the average level of prices over a given period; what it can do is to diminish the gap between the highest and the lowest prices.”

— Ludwig von Mises

288. “Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.”

— Ludwig von Mises

289. “If, as is generally the case, the heirs are not equal to the demands which life makes on an entrepreneur, the inherited wealth rapidly vanishes.”

— Ludwig von Mises

290. “All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.”

— Ludwig von Mises

291. “When we call a capitalist society a consumers democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers ballot, held daily in the marketplace.”

— Ludwig von Mises

292. “Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.”

— Ludwig von Mises

293. “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.”

— Ludwig von Mises

294. “Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.”

— Ludwig von Mises

295. “Every step toward the elimination of profit is progress on the way toward social disintegration.”

— Ludwig von Mises

296. “Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator.”

— Ludwig von Mises

297. “Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.”

— Ludwig von Mises

298. “What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.”

— Ludwig von Mises

299. “The development of capitalism consists in everyone having the right to serve the consumer better or more cheaply.”

— Ludwig von Mises

300. “The policies advocated by the welfare school remove the incentive to saving on the part of private citizens.”

— Ludwig von Mises