Seen from the point of view of the particular group interests of the bureaucrats, every measure that makes the government’s payroll swell is progress.
My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.
Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.
A citizen who casts his ballot without having to the best of his abilities studied as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties.
Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people.
The boom squanders through malinvestment scarce factors of production and reduces the stock available through overconsumption; its alleged blessings are paid for by impoverishment.
The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.
A nation, therefore, has no right to say to a province: You belong to me, I want to take you. A province consists of its inhabitants. If anybody has a right to be heard in this case it is these inhabitants. Boundary disputes should be settled by plebiscite.
The fact is that, under a capitalistic system, the ultimate bosses are the consumers. The sovereign is not the state, it is the people.
Every man aims at avoiding what causes him pain; the activities of government ultimately consist in the infliction of pain. All great achievements of mankind were the product of a spontaneous effort on the part of individuals; government substitutes coercion for voluntary action.
Thus, the isolated interference with one or a few prices of consumer goods always bring about effects-and this is important to realize-which are even less satisfactory than the conditions that prevailed before.
The philosophy commonly called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus.
The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.
Every step by which an individual substitutes concerted action for isolated action results in an immediate and recognizable improvement in his conditions. The advantages derived from peaceful cooperation and division of labor are universal.
Not mythical material productive forces, but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common-sense and moral courage.
It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine’s correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconscious convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.
An intellectual inferiority of the masses would manifest itself most evidently in their aiming at the abolition of the system in which they themselves are supreme and are served by the elite of the most talented men.
What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume.
Planning other people’s actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them.
The essence of democracy is not that everyone makes and administers laws but that lawgivers and rulers should be dependent on the people’s will in such a way that they may be peaceably changed if conflict occurs.