There would not be any profits but for the eagerness of the public to acquire the merchandise offered for sale by the successful entrepreneur. But the same people who scramble for these articles vilify the businessman and call his profit ill-got.
The inequality of income and fortunes is essential in capitalism.
The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-employment policy.
Every specific tax, as well as the nation’s whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.
What is needed for a sound expansion of production is additional capital goods, not money or fiduciary media. The credit expansion is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse.
The causes of all panics, crashes and depressions can be summed up in only four words: the misuse of credit.
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.
During the 2300 years since Plato, very little opposition has been registered to his ideas.
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.
In all countries with a settled bureaucracy people used to say: The cabinets come and go, but the bureaus remain.
A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital unit per unit of its population.
The capitalist system was termed “capitalism” not by a friend of the system, but by an individual who considered it to be the worst of all historical systems, the greatest evil that had ever befallen mankind. That man was Karl Marx.
Two hundred years ago, before the advent of capitalism, a man’s social status was fixed from the beginning to the end of his life; he inherited it from his ancestors and it never changed.
What is lacking to the underdeveloped nations is not knowledge, but capital.
There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.
The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.
What vitiates entirely the socialists economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumers in the market economy.
Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.
Under the gold standard gold is money and money is gold. It is immaterial whether or not the laws assign legal tender quality only to gold coins minted by the government.
Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous.