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 ultimately asking for more compulsion and less freedom.
Source: Human Action (1949)
[link] #52What basis for war could there still be, once all peoples had been set free?
Source: Nation, State, and Economy (1919)
[link] #97Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.
Source: Nation, State, and Economy (1919)
[link] #134The 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 bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
Source: Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944)
[link] #205The rich, the owners of the already operating plants, have no particular class interest in the maintenance of free competition. They are opposed to confiscation and expropriation of their fortunes, but their vested interests are rather in favor of measures preventing newcomers from challenging their position. 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 and whose ingenuity will make the life of coming generations more agreeable. They want the way left open to further economic improvements. They are the spokesmen of material progress.
Source: Human Action (1949)
[link] #223Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hangs on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.
Source: Socialism (1951, original German 1922)
[link] #265The essence of an individual's freedom is the opportunity to deviate from traditional ways of thinking and of doing things.
Source: Theory and History (1957)
[link] #266Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.
Tax-supported universities are under the sway of the party in power. The authorities try to appoint only professors who are ready to advance ideas of which they themselves approve… In their opinion, the first duty of the university is to sell the official social philosophy to the rising generation.
Source: Human Action (1949)
[link] #452The 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.
Source: The Gold Problem (1965)
[link] #563It 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.
Source: Omnipotent Government (1944)
[link] #608The 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.
Source: Omnipotent Government (1944)
[link] #644It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. 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.
Source: Human Action (1949)
[link] #689About Ludwig Von Mises
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (29 September 1881—10 October 1973) was one of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century. In the course of a long and highly productive life, he developed an integrated, deductive science of economics based on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act purposively to achieve desired goals. Even though his economic analysis itself was "value-free" — in the sense of being irrelevant to values held by economists — Mises concluded that the only viable economic policy for the human race was a policy of unrestricted laissez-faire, of free markets and the unhampered exercise of the right of private property, with government strictly limited to the defense of person and property within its territorial area.
For Mises was able to demonstrate (a) that the expansion of free markets, the division of labor, and private capital investment is the only possible path to the prosperity and flourishing of the human race; (b) that socialism would be disastrous for a modern economy because the absence of private ownership of land and capital goods prevents any sort of rational pricing, or estimate of costs, and (c) that government intervention, in addition to hampering and crippling the market, would prove counter-productive and cumulative, leading inevitably to socialism unless the entire tissue of interventions was repealed.
Holding these views, and hewing to truth indomitably in the face of a century increasingly devoted to statism and collectivism, Mises became famous for his "intransigence" in insisting on a non-inflationary gold standard and on laissez-faire.
Effectively barred from any paid university post in Austria and later in the United States, Mises pursued his course gallantly. As the chief economic adviser to the Austrian government in the 1920s, Mises was, with the help of Chancellor Ignaz Seipel, able to slow down Austrian inflation; and he developed his own "private seminar" which attracted the outstanding young economists, social scientists, and philosophers throughout Europe. As the founder of the "neo-Austrian School" of economics, Mises’s business cycle theory, which blamed inflation and depressions on inflationary bank credit encouraged by Central Banks, was adopted by most younger economists in England in the early 1930s as the best explanation of the Great Depression.
Having fled the Nazis to the United States, Mises did some of his most important work here. In over two decades of teaching, he inspired an emerging Austrian School in the United States. The year after Mises died in 1973, his most distinguished follower, F.A. Hayek, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in elaborating Mises’s business cycle theory during the later 1920s and 1930s.
Additional Resources
Liberty and Economics: The Ludwig von Mises Legacy - YouTubeLudwig von Mises Profile - Mises InstituteLudwig von Mises - Wikipedia
