No private enterprise will ever fall prey to bureaucratic methods of management if it is operated with the sole aim of making profit.
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.
Taxes are necessary. But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful capitalists and entrepreneurs.
The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism.
Every restriction of trade creates vested interests that are from then on opposed to its removal.
The mixing of politics and business not only is detrimental to politics, as is frequently observed, but even much more so to business.
A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.
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.
He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.
An essential point in the social philosophy of interventionism is the existence of an inexhaustible fund which can be squeezed forever. The whole system of interventionism collapses when the fountain is drained off: The Santa Clause principle liquidates itself.
Capital is not a free gift of God or of nature. It is the outcome of a provident restriction of consumption on the part of man. It is created and increased by saving and maintained by the abstention from dissaving.
Government is an apparatus of compulsion and coercion.
Freedom and liberty always mean freedom from police interference.
Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.
The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness.
Marx and Engels openly declared that the progressive income tax and the death tax are ‘economically untenable’ and that they advocated them only because ‘they necessitate further inroads’ upon the capitalist system and are ‘unavoidable’ as a means of bringing about socialism.
We must fight all that we dislike in public life. We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas.
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.
In the market economy the worker sells his services as other people sell their commodities. The employer is not the employee’s lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he must purchase at their market price.
All almsgiving inevitably tends to pauperize the recipient.