The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.
Tag: Ludwig von Mises
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher
Closet capitalists
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.
Demagogues and bureaucrats
He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.
Democracy as a stratagem
The Marxian’s love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.
How socialism becomes fascism
If the State takes the power of disposal from the owner piecemeal, by extending its influence over production; if its power to determine what direction production shall be, is increased, then the owner is left at last with nothing except the empty name of ownership, and property has passed into the hands of the State.
Avoiding barbarism
If we wish to save the world from barbarism, we have to refute socialism.
The importance of private property rights
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization. There is no experience to the effect that socialism could provide a standard of living as high as that provided by capitalism.
Peace through freedom
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.
False prosperity
War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or plague brings.
Socialism despoils
Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.