The Best Ludwig Von Mises quotes

Socialist society is a society of officials. — Ludwig Von Mises

Society is best served when the means of production are in the possession of those who know how to use them best. — Ludwig Von Mises

The wealth of the well–to–do of an industrial society is both the cause and effect of the masses’ well–being. — Ludwig Von Mises

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. — Ludwig Von Mises

The continued existence of society depends upon private property. — Ludwig Von Mises

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

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. — Ludwig Von Mises

The member of a contractual society is free because he serves others only in serving himself. What restrains him is only the inevitable natural phenomenon of scarcity. — Ludwig Von Mises

It is untrue that some are poor because others are rich. If an order of society in which incomes were equal replaced the capitalist order, everyone would become poorer. — Ludwig Von Mises

The interventionist policy (big government) provides thousands and thousands of people with safe, placid, and not too strenuous jobs at the expense of the rest of society. — Ludwig Von Mises

No increase in the welfare of the member of society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money. — Ludwig Von Mises

In a capitalist society one can hold on to one’s fortune only if one perpetually acquires it anew by investing it wisely. — Ludwig Von Mises

Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. — Ludwig Von Mises

Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace. — Ludwig Von Mises

Liberty is always freedom from the government. — Ludwig Von Mises

Against nature and within nature there is no freedom. — Ludwig Von Mises

Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes. — Ludwig Von Mises

Freedom and liberty always mean freedom from police interference. — Ludwig Von Mises

The struggle for freedom is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities, sometimes of a minority of but one man gainst the majority. — Ludwig Von Mises

Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom. — Ludwig Von Mises

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. — Ludwig Von Mises

There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them. — Ludwig Von Mises

The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion. — Ludwig Von Mises

The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without. — Ludwig Von Mises

The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. — Ludwig Von Mises

You call it a ‘loophole’ when the government still allows you some freedom. — Ludwig Von Mises

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

The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution. — Ludwig Von Mises

The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism. — Ludwig Von Mises

There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about. — Ludwig Von Mises

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy. — Ludwig Von Mises

The market and its inescapable law are supreme. — Ludwig Von Mises

The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right. — Ludwig Von Mises

The market economy as such does not respect political frontiers. Its field is the world. — Ludwig Von Mises

Where there is no market economy, the best intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter. — Ludwig Von Mises

What vitiates entirely the socialists economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumers in the market economy. — Ludwig Von Mises

There prevails on a free labor market a tendency toward full employment. — Ludwig Von Mises

The market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. — Ludwig Von Mises

Servile labour disappeared because it could not stand the competition of free labour; its un–profitability sealed its doom in the market economy. — Ludwig Von Mises

All those evils which the [liberals] interpret as evidence of the failure of capitalism, are the necessary outcome of interference with the market. — Ludwig Von Mises

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

Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy. — Ludwig Von Mises

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.’ — Ludwig Von Mises

The function of money is to facilitate the business of the market by acting as a common medium of exchange. — Ludwig Von Mises

The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full–employment policy. — Ludwig Von Mises

Only the naive inflationist’s could believe that government could enrich mankind through fiat money. — Ludwig Von Mises

There cannot be stable money within an environment dominated by ideologies hostile to the preservation of economic freedom. — Ludwig Von Mises

All present–day governments are fanatically committed to an easy money policy. — Ludwig Von Mises

The exchange–value of money is the anticipated use–value of the things that can be obtained with it. — Ludwig Von Mises

Inflationism is that monetary policy that seeks to increase the quantity of money. — Ludwig Von Mises

Both force and money are impotent against ideas. — Ludwig Von Mises

Public opinion always wants easy money, that is, low interest rates. — Ludwig Von Mises

Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power. — Ludwig Von Mises

Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power. — Ludwig Von Mises

This, then, is freedom in the external life of man–that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows. — Ludwig Von Mises

Some think that they will exercise power for the general good, but that is what all those with power have believed. Power is evil in itself, regardless of who exercises it. — Ludwig Von Mises

The whole of mankind’s progress has had to be achieved against the resistance and opposition of the state and its power of coercion. — Ludwig Von Mises

The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty. — Ludwig Von Mises

The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody…It is not in the power of the government to make everybody more prosperous. — Ludwig Von Mises

What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume. — Ludwig Von Mises

Naive inflationism demands an increase in the quantity of money without suspecting that this will diminish the purchasing power of the money. — Ludwig Von Mises

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. — Ludwig Von Mises

Big business depends entirely on the patronage of those who buy its products: the biggest enterprises loses its power and its influence when it loses its customers. — Ludwig Von Mises

If you increase the quantity of money, you bring about the lowering of the purchasing power of the monetary unit. — Ludwig Von Mises

There is no such thing as a just and fair method of exercising the tremendous power that interventionism puts into the hands of the legislature and the executive. — Ludwig Von Mises

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. — Ludwig Von Mises

It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power. — Ludwig Von Mises

The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace. — Ludwig Von Mises

The central element in the economic problem of money is the objective exchange–value of money, popularly called its purchasing power. — Ludwig Von Mises

The sharper the competition, the better it serves its social function to improve economic production. — Ludwig Von Mises

The prerequisite for more economic equality in the world is industrialization. And this is possible only through increased capital investment, increased capital accumulation. — Ludwig Von Mises

Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis. — Ludwig Von Mises

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

Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem. — Ludwig Von Mises

Without speculation there can be no economic activity reaching beyond the immediate present. — Ludwig Von Mises

The aim of the popularization of economic studies is not to make every man an economist. The idea is to equip the citizen for his civic functions in community life. — Ludwig Von Mises

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. — Ludwig Von Mises

Under capitalism everybody is the architect of his own fortune. — Ludwig Von Mises

The inequality of income and fortunes is essential in capitalism. — Ludwig Von Mises

Anticapitalism can maintain itself in existence only by sponging on capitalism. — Ludwig Von Mises

The development of capitalism consists in everyone having the right to serve the consumer better or more cheaply. — Ludwig Von Mises

Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. — Ludwig Von Mises

What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you. — Ludwig Von Mises

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. — Ludwig Von Mises

The system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism. — Ludwig Von Mises

The fact is that, under a capitalistic system, the ultimate bosses are the consumers. The sovereign is not the state, it is the people. — Ludwig Von Mises

The market economy–capitalism–is a social system of consumers’ supremacy. — Ludwig Von Mises

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. — Ludwig Von Mises

What economic calculation requires is a monetary system whose functioning is not sabotaged by government interference. — Ludwig Von Mises

The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. — Ludwig Von Mises

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. — Ludwig Von Mises

The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the Führer principle. — Ludwig Von Mises

Every specific tax, as well as the nation’s whole tax system, becomes self–defeating above a certain height of the rates. — Ludwig Von Mises

Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps. — Ludwig Von Mises

Capitalism or market economy is that system of social cooperation and division of labor that is based on private ownership of the means of production. — Ludwig Von Mises

The market system makes all producers responsible to the consumer. — Ludwig Von Mises

There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than to let the market system work. — Ludwig Von Mises

The capitalist system, in spite of all obstacles put in its way by governments and politicians, has raised the standard of living of the masses in an unprecedented way. — Ludwig Von Mises