Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Ludwig von Mises. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (German: [ˈluːtvɪç fɔn ˈmiːzəs]; 29 September 1881 – 10 October 1973) was an Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberalism. He is best known for his work on praxeology, a study of human choice and action.
Mises emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1940. Since the mid-20th century, libertarian movements have been strongly influenced by Mises's writings. Mises' student Friedrich Hayek viewed Mises as one of the major figures in the revival of classical liberalism in the post-war era. Hayek's work "The Transmission of the Ideals of Freedom" (1951) pays high tribute to the influence of Mises in the 20th century libertarian movement.
Mises's Private Seminar was a leading group of economists. Many of its alumni, including Friedrich Hayek and Oskar Morgenstern, emigrated from Austria to the United States and Great Britain. Mises has been described as having approximately seventy close students in Austria.
There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men.
Spontaneous actions of individuals, aiming at nothing else than at the improvement of their own state of satisfaction, undermined the prestige of the coercive status system step by step.
A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state.
If any of the socialist chiefs had tried to earn his living by selling hot dogs, he would have learned something about the sovereignty of the consumers.
It is a rule of law alone which hinders the rulers from turning themselves into the worst gangsters.
In capitalist enterprise there is no secure income and no security of wealth.
Economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings and actions.
The word Capitalism expresses, for our age, the sum of all evil. Even the opponents of Socialism are dominated by socialist ideas.
All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out.
In the bureaucratic machine of socialism the way toward promotion is not achievement but the favor of the superiors.
What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.
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.
Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.
Capitalists have the tendency to move toward those countries in which there is plenty of labor available and at which labor is reasonable. And by the fact that they bring capital into these countries, they bring about a trend toward higher wage rates.
For it is an essential difference between capitalist and socialist production that under capitalism men provide for themselves, while under Socialism they are provided for.
Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.
A short time ago the demagogues blamed capitalism for the poverty of the masses. Today they rather blame capitalism for the affluence that it bestows upon the common man.
It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments.
The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.
Nobody is in a position to decree what should make a fellow man happier.
The unpopularity of economics is the result of its analysis of the effects of privileges. It is impossible to invalidate the economists demonstration that all privileges hurt the interests of the rest of the nation or at least a great part of it.
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.
As the science of economics...exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.
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.
The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.
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.
The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-employment policy.
A free press can only exist where there is private control over the means of production.
All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.
The inequality of income and fortunes is essential in capitalism.
Production is not something physical, material, and external; it is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon.
Freedom and liberty always mean freedom from police interference.
Liberalism must be intolerant of every sort of intolerance.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.
This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.
The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.
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. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by governments.
The whole of mankind's progress has had to be achieved against the resistance and opposition of the state and its power of coercion.
There is no reason why capitalists and entrepreneurs should be ashamed of earning profits.
Inflation is the true opium of the people and it is administered to them by anticapitalist governments and parties.
Seen from the point of view of the particular group interests of the bureaucrats, every measure that makes the government's payroll swell is progress.
He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.
Lenin's ideal was to build a nation's production effort according to the model of the post office.
Man is not, like the animals, an obsequious puppet of instincts and sensual impulses. Man has the power to suppress instinctive desires, he has a will of his own, he chooses between incompatible ends.
The riches of successful entrepreneurs is not the cause of anybody's poverty; it is the consequence of the fact that the consumers are better supplied than they would have been in the absence of the entrepreneur's efforts.
The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself.
The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the mythical Santa Claus. They cannot spend except by taking out of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others.
The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done.
The governments alone are responsible for the spread of the superstitious awe with which the common man looks upon every bit of paper upon which the treasury or agencies which it controls have printed the magical words legal tender.
The better an entrepreneur succeeds, the more is he vilified and themore is he soaked by taxation.
Assistance granted to the unemployed does not dispose of unemployment. It makes it easier for the unemployed to remain idle.
Every extension of the functions and power of the State beyond its primary duty of maintaining peace and justice should be scrutinized with jealous vigilance.
A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital unit per unit of its population.
The illusiveness of this concept of national income is to be seen in its dependence on changes in the purchasing power of the monetary unit. The more inflation progresses, the higher rises the national income.
If you increase the quantity of money, you bring about the lowering of the purchasing power of the monetary unit.
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!
The school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character as long as it remains a public and compulsory institution.
No increase in the welfare of the member of society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money.
The masses do not like those who surpass them in any regard. The average man envies and hates those who are different.
Daily experience proves clearly to everybody but the most bigoted fanatics of socialism that governmental management is inefficient and wasteful.
The mixing of politics and business not only is detrimental to politics, as is frequently observed, but even much more so to business.
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 people who think that the power of big business is enormous are mistaken.
Big business always serve -- directly or indirectly -- the masses.
Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe.
Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.
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.
Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator.
A wealthy man can preserve his wealth only by continuing to serve the consumers in the most efficient way.
The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave.
Everybody thinks of economics whether he is aware of it or not. In joining a political party or in casting his ballot, the citizen implicitly takes a stand upon essential economic theories.
War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings...but no one has for those reasons yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.
The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble. It would create poverty for all.
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.
There cannot be stable money within an environment dominated by ideologies hostile to the preservation of economic freedom.
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.
Where there is no market economy, the best intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.
In public administration there is no connection between revenue and expenditure.
If it is unnecessary to adjust the amount of expenditure to the means available, there is no limit to the spending of the great god State.
Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man's human existence.
No one should expect that any logical argument or any experience could ever shake the almost religious fervor of those who believe in salvation through spending and credit expansion.
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.
Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other.
The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.
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.
Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.
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.
Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange.
Aggressors cannot wage total war without introducing Socialism.
American authors or scientists are prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money.
The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without.
Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.