The comparatively greater prosperity of the United States is an outcome of the fact that the New Deal did not come in 1900 or 1910, but only in 1933.
Public opinion takes no offense at the endeavors of farmers, workers, clerks, teachers, doctors, ministers, and people from many other callings to earn as much as they can. But it censures the capitalists and entrepreneurs for their greed.
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.
Unemployment doles can have no other effect than the perpetuation of unemployment.
Within the market society each serves all his fellow citizens and each is served by them. It is a system of mutual exchange of services and commodities, a mutual giving, and receiving.
The government and its chiefs do not have the powers of the mythical Santa Claus. They cannot spend except by taking out of the pockets of some people for the benefit of others.
Fortunes cannot grow; someone has to increase them.
Our whole civilization rests on the fact that men have always succeeded in beating off the attack of the re-distributors.
Experience shows that nothing is operated with less economy and with more waste of labor and material of every kind than public services and undertakings. Private enterprise on the other hand naturally induces the owner to work with the greatest economy in his own interest.
No one should expect that any logical argument or any experience could ever shake the almost religious fervor of those who believe in salvation through spending and credit expansion.
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.
An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes and entrepreneur by seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy.
What governments call international monetary cooperation is concerted action for the sake of credit expansion.
The government pretends to be endowed with the mystical power to accord favors out of an inexhaustible horn of plenty. It is both omniscient and omnipotent. It can by a magic wand create happiness and abundance. The truth is the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody.
If it is unnecessary to adjust the amount of expenditure to the means available, there is no limit to the spending of the great god State.
The riches of successful entrepreneurs is not the cause of anybody’s poverty; it is the consequence of the fact that the consumers are better supplied than they would have been in the absence of the entrepreneur’s efforts.
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.