It has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes.
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.
The masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the populace, are molding public opinion.
Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.
The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments.
The system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism.
The causes of all panics, crashes and depressions can be summed up in only four words: the misuse of credit.
The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.
In relation to the immense sacrifices that the state demands of the individual through the blood tax, it seems rather incidental whether it compensates the soldier more or less abundantly for the loss of time that he suffers from his military-service obligation.
Keynes did not teach us how to perform the miracle of turning a stone into bread, but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn.
The consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.
The masses, in their capacity as consumers, ultimately determine everybody's revenues and wealth.
We must fight all that we dislike in public life. We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas.
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.
The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's: 'If you seek his monument, look around.'
The continued existence of society depends upon private property.
The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.
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.
In spite of the anticapitalistic policies of all governments and of almost all political parties, the capitalist mode of production.
In the long run the ideas of the majority, however detrimental they may be, will carry on. The future of mankind depends on the ability of the elite to influence public opinion in the right direction.
The methods of the natural sciences cannot be applied to human behavior because this behaviorlacks the peculiarity that characterizes events in the field of the natural sciences, viz., regularity.
All present-day governments are fanatically committed to an easy money policy.
What generates war is the economic philosophy of nationalism: embargoes, trade and foreign exchange controls, monetary devaluation, etc. The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.
Under capitalism everybody provides for their own needs by serving others.
It is the rule of law alone which hinders the rulers from turning themselves into the worst gangsters.
No private enterprise will ever fall prey to bureaucratic methods of management if it is operated with the sole aim of making profit.
An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes and entrepreneur by seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy.
No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.
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.
The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is
ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas
engender social institutions, political changes, technologi-
cal methods of production, and all that is called economic
conditions.
It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom. The first requisite for a better social order is the return to unrestricted freedom of thought and speech.
The market economy-capitalism-is a social system of consumers' supremacy.
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.
In the capitalist society there is a place and bread for all. Its ability to expand provides sustenance for every worker. Permanent unemployment is not a feature of free capitalism.
Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.
Capitalism has improved the standard of living of the wage earners to an unprecedented extent. The average American family enjoys today amenities of which, only a hundred years ago, not even the richest nabobs dreamed.
The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.
The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.
There would not be any profits but for the eagerness of the public to acquire the merchandise offered for sale by the successful entrepreneur. But the same people who scramble for these articles vilify the businessman and call his profit ill-got.
Rulers do not like to admit that their power is restricted by any laws other than those of physics and biology. They never ascribe their failures and frustrations to the violation of economic law.
Every government intervention in the marketplace creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.
The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness.
No matter how efficient school training may be, it would only produce stagnation, orthodoxy, and rigid pedantry if there were no uncommon men pushing forward beyond the wisdom of their tutors.
What can prevent the coming of totalitarian socialism is only a thorough change in ideologies. What we need is an open positive endorsement of that system to which we owe all the wealth that distinguished our age from the conditions of ages gone by.
Our whole civilization rests on the fact that men have always succeeded in beating off the attack of the re-distributors.
There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.
It is indeed one of the principal drawbacks of every kind of interventionism that it is so difficult to reverse the process.
It is the consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor.
The 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.
The gold standard makes the money's purchasing power independent of the changing, ambitions and doctrines of political parties and pressure groups. This is not a defect of the gold standard; it is its main excellence.
How pale is the art of sorcerers, witches, and conjurors when compared with that of the government's Treasury Department!
Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.
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.
Every socialist is a disguised dictator.
Every step which leads from capitalism toward planning is necessarily a step nearer to absolutism and dictatorship.
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.
Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.
War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.
The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.
Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.
Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.
A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.
To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.
Men are fighting... because they are convinced that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.
If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed.
Only one thing can conquer war -- that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation.
Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public.
War... is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.
Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.
The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.
Longer Version:
The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war. The wars of our age are not at variance with popular economic doctrines; they are, on the contrary, the inescapable result of a consistent application of these doctrines.
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.