Quotes About Ludwig von Mises

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.

Against what is stupid, nonsensical, erroneous, and evil, [classical] liberalism fights with the weapons of the mind, and not with brute force and repression.

The philosophy commonly called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus.

But Hayek is also one of the handful of social scientists who (along with his teacher Ludwig von Mises) demonstrated more than sixty years ago why the socialist system could not work and, thus, why it would eventually collapse, as it did in 1989.

Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.

It is extremely difficult for our contemporaries to conceive of the conditions of free banking because they take government interference with banking for granted and as necessary.

The masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the populace, are molding public opinion.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us. Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit-motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to produce real and expanding wealth—not only for the rich but

As far back as 1922, Ludwig von Mises wrote a 500-page treatise predicting that socialism would not work. Socialist theorists, he wrote, had failed to recognize basic economic realities that would eventually bankrupt the future they were creating. These included the indispensability of markets for allocating resources, and of private property for providing the incentives that drive the engines of social wealth.

every type of socialism is unworkable because economic calculation is impossible in a socialist community.

The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.

It suffices here to say that the planned economy which the advocates of dictatorship wish to set up is precisely as socialistic as the Socialism propagated by the self-styled Social Democrats.

Adept as he was in the Hegelian dialectic — a system easy of abuse by those who seek to dominate thought by arbitrary flights of fancy and metaphysical verbosity — he was not slow in finding a way out of the dilemma in which socialists found themselves.

Under certain conditions, index numbers may do very useful service as an aid to investigation into the history and statistics of prices; for the extension of the theory of the nature and value of money they are unfortunately not very important.

The people of the United States are more prosperous than the inhabitants of all other countries because their government embarked later than the governments in other parts of the world upon the policy of obstructing business.

the subjective theory of value

the relations between the equilibrium rate of interest and the money rate of interest, which will be dealt with in the Third Part of this book.

the Keynesian miracle fails to materialize; the stones do not turn into bread.

Tacitly underlying Marxian theory is the nebulous idea that the natural factors of production are such that they need not be economized.

panmechanistic world view is committed to a methodological monism; it acknowledges only mechanistic causality because it attributes to it alone any cognitive value or at least a higher cognitive value than to teleology.

The Marxians love of democratic institutions was a stratagem only, a pious fraud for the deception of the masses. Within a socialist community there is no room left for freedom.

The average man is both better informed and less corruptible in the decisions he makes as a consumer than as a voter at political elections.