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No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.

Ludwig von Mises

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Ludwig von Mises
Age: 92 †
Born: 1881
Born: September 29
Died: 1973
Died: October 10
Economist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Lemberg
Austria
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
Ludwig Heinrich Mises
Present
Economics
Remedy
Liberty
Avoid
Immediate
Economic
Tasks
Ill
Greater
Allow
Attempt
Knowledge
Usually
Acts
Remoter
Future
Effects
Seeds
Foretell
Much
Deep
Task
Sowing
Needed
Measure
Grasping

More quotes by Ludwig von Mises

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Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment. Neither is value in words and doctrines, it is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act.
Ludwig von Mises
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Profits are the driving force of the market economy. The greater the profits, the better the needs of the consumers are supplied... He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.
Ludwig von Mises
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The public firm can nowhere maintain itself in free competition with the private firm it is possible today only where it has a monopoly that excludes competition. Even that alone is evidence of its lesser economic productivity.
Ludwig von Mises
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Do the American voters know that the unprecedented improvement in their standard of living that the last hundred years brought was the result of the steady rise in the per-head quota of capital invested? Do they realize that every measure leading to capital decumulation jeopardizes their prosperity?
Ludwig von Mises
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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.
Ludwig von Mises
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The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers.
Ludwig von Mises
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The policy of letting the free market determine the height of wage rates is the only reasonable and successful full-employment policy.
Ludwig von Mises
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The masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the populace, are molding public opinion.
Ludwig von Mises
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Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty.
Ludwig von Mises
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To the masses, the catchwords of Socialism sound so enticing... so they will continue to work for Socialism, helping thereby to bring about the inevitable decline of the civilization which the nations of the West have taken thousands of years to build up.
Ludwig von Mises
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The tow pillars of democratic government are the primacy of the law and the budget.
Ludwig von Mises
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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.
Ludwig von Mises
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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.
Ludwig von Mises
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When we call a capitalist society a consumers democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers ballot, held daily in the marketplace.
Ludwig von Mises
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Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'être to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man's innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.
Ludwig von Mises
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Scientific research sooner or later, but inevitably, encounters something ultimately given that it cannot trace back to something else of which it would appear as the regular or necessary derivative. Scientific progress consists in pushing further back this ultimately given.
Ludwig von Mises
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Changes in human conditions are brought about by the pioneering of the cleverest and most energetic men. They take the lead and the rest of mankind follows them little by little.
Ludwig von Mises
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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.
Ludwig von Mises
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The living is not perfect because it is liable to change the dead is not perfect because it does not live.
Ludwig von Mises
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Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.
Ludwig von Mises