Competition on the market aims at assigning to every individual that function in the social system in which he can render to all his fellow men the most valuable of the services he is able to perform.
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.
A free press can only exist where there is private control over the means of production.
Servile labour disappeared because it could not stand the competition of free labour; its un-profitability sealed its doom in the market economy.
Where there is no market economy, the best intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.
Liberalism must be intolerant of every sort of intolerance.
The characteristic feature of a free society is that it can function in spite of the fact that its members disagree in many judgments of value. Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes.
Progress is precisely that which rules and regulations did not foresee.
Professor von Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard.
A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.
Action based on reason, action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.
If one regards inflation as an evil, then one has to stop inflating. One has to balance the budget of the government.
The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.
It is indeed one of the principal drawbacks of every kind of interventionism that it is so difficult to reverse the process.
It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.
The socialist system, however, forbids this fundamental freedom to choose one’s own career. Under socialist conditions, there is only one economic authority, and it has the right to determine all matters concerning production.
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.
An anti-something movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be.
The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.
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.