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The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.

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
Quality
Consumers
Common
Buying
Men
Ultimately
Abstention
Economics
Determines
Determine
Consumer
Whose
Sovereign
Liberty
Quantity
Economic
Produced

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The main achievement of economics is that it has provided a theory of peaceful human cooperation. This is why the harbingers of violent conflict have branded it as a dismal science and why this age of wars, civil wars, and destruction has no use for it.
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The democracy of the market consists in the fact that people themselves make their choices and that no dictator has the power to force them to submit to his value judgments.
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Violent resistance against the power of the state is the last resort of the minority in its effort to break loose from the oppression of the majority. ... The citizen must not be so narrowly circumscribed in his activities that, if he thinks differently from those in power, his only choice is either to perish or to destroy the machinery of state.
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It is the rule of law alone which hinders the rulers from turning themselves into the worst gangsters.
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Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.
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The struggle for freedom is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities, sometimes of a minority of but one man gainst the majority.
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As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug.
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If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace.
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Fortunes cannot grow someone has to increase them.
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If people do not consume their whole incomes, the non-consumed surplus can be invested, it increases the amount of capital goods available and thereby makes it possible to embark upon projects which could not be executed before.
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True, governments can reduce the rate of interest in the short run. They can issue additional paper money. They can open the way to credit expansion by the banks. They can thus create an artificial boom and the appearance of prosperity. But such a boom is bound to collapse soon or late and to bring about a depression.
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While under precapitalistic conditions superior men were the masters on whom the masses of the inferior had to attend, under capitalism the more gifted and more able have no means to profit from their superiority other than to serve to the best of their abilities the wishes of the majority of the less gifted.
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What workers must learn is that the only reason why wage rates are higher in the United States is that the per head quota of capital invested is higher.
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The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.
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The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression.
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The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
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Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that.
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Action based on reason, action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.
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There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.
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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.
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