Top 500 Ludwig von Mises Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “Where the currency depreciation is a result of government inflation carried out by the issue of notes, it is possible to avert its disastrous effect on economic calculation by conducting all bookkeeping in a stable money instead. But so far as the depreciation is a depreciation of gold, the world money, there is no such easy way out.”

— Ludwig von Mises

402. “The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from pre-capitalist methods of production was its new principle of marketing. Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.”

— Ludwig von Mises

403. “The philosophy underlying the system of progressive taxation is that the income and wealth of the well-to-do classes can be freely tapped. What the advocates of these tax rates fail to realize is that the greater part of the incomes taxed away would not have been consumed but saved and invested.”

— Ludwig von Mises

404. “There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than to let the market system work.”

— Ludwig von Mises

405. “Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of what is called economic freedom.”

— Ludwig von Mises

406. “A citizen who casts his ballot without having to the best of his abilities studied as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties.”

— Ludwig von Mises

407. “To assign to everybody his proper place in society is the task of the consumers. Their buying and abstention from buying is instrumental in determining each individual’s social position.”

— Ludwig von Mises

408. “There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.”

— Ludwig von Mises

409. “Stable government requires the free consent of those ruled. Tyranny, even the tyranny of benevolent despots, cannot bring lasting peace and prosperity. There.”

— Ludwig von Mises

410. “It is not easy to determine whether there are any who still adhere in good faith to the doctrine that traces back the depreciation of money to the activity of speculators. The doctrine is an indispensable instrument of the lowest form of demagogy; it is the resource of governments in search of a scapegoat. There are scarcely any independent writers nowadays who defend it; those who support it are paid to do so.”

— Ludwig von Mises

411. “All attempts to coerce the living will of human beings into the service of something they do not want must fail.”

— Ludwig von Mises

412. “The public firm can nowhere maintain itself in free competition with the private firm; it is possible today only where it has a monopoly that excludes competition. Even that alone is evidence of its lesser economic productivity.”

— Ludwig von Mises

413. “The comparatively greater prosperity of the United States is an outcome of the fact that the New Deal did not come in 1900 or 1910, but only in 1933.”

— Ludwig von Mises

414. “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.”

— Ludwig von Mises

415. “Is still fulfilling its social function in supplying the consumers with more, better and cheaper goods.”

— Ludwig von Mises

416. “They did not suffer shipwreck because the entrepreneurs were not public-spirited, as the socialist-etatistic legend has it. They were bound to fail because the economic organization based upon division of labour and private property in the means of production can function only so long as price-determination in the market is free.”

— Ludwig von Mises

417. “But even a victory of planning will not mean the end of history. Atrocious wars among the candidates for the supreme office will break out. Totalitarianism may wipe out civilization, even the whole of the human race. Then, of course, history will have come to its end too.”

— Ludwig von Mises

418. “The moneyprice of any commodity in any place, under the assumption of completely unrestricted exchange and disregarding the differences arising from the time taken in transit, must be the same as the price at any other place, augmented or diminished by the money-cost of transport.”

— Ludwig von Mises

419. “There is joint action, but no joint thinking. There is only tradition which preserves thoughts and communicates them to others as a stimulus to their thinking.”

— Ludwig von Mises

420. “The agents of etatism have certainly not been lacking in zeal and energy. But, for all this, economic affairs cannot be kept going by magistrates and policemen.”

— Ludwig von Mises

421. “But when States did debase the coinage, it was always from purely fiscal motives. The government needed financial help, that was all; it was not concerned with questions of currency policy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

422. “Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.”

— Ludwig von Mises

423. “Hence, the statement that the cost of living is different in different localities only means that the same individual cannot secure the same degree of satisfaction from the same stock of goods in different places.”

— Ludwig von Mises

424. “It is not the poverty of individuals and the community, not indebtedness to foreign nations, not the unfavourableness of the conditions of production, that force up the rate of exchange, but inflation.”

— Ludwig von Mises

425. “Inflation made it possible to divert the fury of the people to ‘speculators’ and ‘profiteers’. Thus it proved itself an excellent psychological resource of the destructive and annihilist war policy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

426. “All present-day governments are fanatically committed to an easy money policy.”

— Ludwig von Mises

427. “What impels every man to the utmost exertion in the service of his fellow man. Is, in the market not compulsion on the part of gendarmes, hangmen and penal courts, it is self interest.”

— Ludwig von Mises

428. “The prevailing legal and moral views of a time are held not only by those whom they benefit but by those, too, who appear to suffer from them. Their domination is expressed in that fact- that the people from whom they claim sacrifice accept them.”

— Ludwig von Mises

429. “History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law. There is no means to abstract from a historical experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies. The.”

— Ludwig von Mises

430. “To recapitulate: the exchange-ratio subsisting between commodities and money is everywhere the same. But men and their wants are not everywhere the same, and neither are commodities. Only if these distinctions are ignored is it possible to speak of local differences in the purchasing power of money or to say that living is dearer in one place than in another.”

— Ludwig von Mises

431. “The masses, in their capacity as consumers, ultimately determine everybody’s revenues and wealth.”

— Ludwig von Mises

432. “What workers must learn is that the only reason why wage rates are higher in the United States is that the per head quota of capital invested is higher.”

— Ludwig von Mises

433. “What matters is not the allocation of portions out of a fund presented to man by nature. The problem is rather to further those social institutions which enable people to continue and to enlarge the production of all those things which they need.”

— Ludwig von Mises

434. “The aim was to regulate the value of money by increasing or diminishing the quantity of it. The effects of these measures appeared to provide an inductive proof of the correctness of this superficial version of the Quantity Theory, and incidentally concealed the weaknesses of its logic.”

— Ludwig von Mises

435. “No better is the propensity, very popular nowadays, to brand supporters of other ideologies as lunatics. Psychiatrists.”

— Ludwig von Mises

436. “The people who think that the power of big business is enormous are mistaken.”

— Ludwig von Mises

437. “No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.”

— Ludwig von Mises

438. “For the etatist, money is a creature of the State, and the esteem in which money is held is the economic expression of the respect or prestige enjoyed by the State. The more powerful and the richer the State, the better its money. Thus, during the War, it was asserted that ‘the monetary standard of the victors’ would ultimately be the best money. Yet victory and defeat on the battlefield can exercise only an indirect influence on the value of money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

439. “One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism; it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision.”

— Ludwig von Mises

440. “Etatism, as a theory, is the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State, and, as a policy, the attempt to regulate all mundane affairs by authoritative commandment and prohibition. The ideal society of etatism is a particular sort of socialistic community; it is usual in discussions involving this ideal society to speak of State Socialism, or, in some connexions, of Christian Socialism.”

— Ludwig von Mises

441. “There is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and describe. There is human action.”

— Ludwig von Mises

442. “Public opinion takes no offense at the endeavors of farmers, workers, clerks, teachers, doctors, ministers, and people from many other callings to earn as much as they can. But it censures the capitalists and entrepreneurs for their greed.”

— Ludwig von Mises

443. “The supremacy of public opinion determines not only the singular role that economics occupies in the complex of thought and knowledge. It determines the whole process of human history.”

— Ludwig von Mises

444. “When a country has substituted credit money or fiat money for metallic money, because the legal equating of the over-issued paper and the metallic money sets in motion the mechanism described by Gresham’s Law, it is often asserted that the balance of payments determines the rate of exchange. But this also is a quite inadequate explanation. The rate of exchange is determined by the purchasing power possessed by a unit of each kind of money.”

— Ludwig von Mises

445. “It is impossible to describe any human action if one does not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as well as in the end his response is aiming at.”

— Ludwig von Mises

446. “Those who disagree with the dictator’s plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.”

— Ludwig von Mises

447. “An intellectual inferiority of the masses would manifest itself most evidently in their aiming at the abolition of the system in which they themselves are supreme and are served by the elite of the most talented men.”

— Ludwig von Mises

448. “The collapse of an inflation policy carried to its extreme – as in the United States in 1781 and in France in 1796 – does not destroy the monetary system, but only the credit money or fiat money of the State that has overestimated the effectiveness of its own policy. The collapse emancipates commerce from etatism and establishes metallic money again.”

— Ludwig von Mises

449. “The main achievement of economics is that it has provided a theory of peaceful human cooperation. This is why the harbingers of violent conflict have branded it as a dismal science and why this age of wars, civil wars, and destruction has no use for it.”

— Ludwig von Mises

450. “It is inherent in the nature of the capitalistic economy that, in the final analysis, the employment of the factors of production is aimed only toward serving the wishes of consumers.”

— Ludwig von Mises