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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.

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
Ideas
Economic
Economics
Despotism
Reason
Stop
Determine
Trend
Human
Courses
Material
Trends
Humans
Course
Materials
Affairs
Moral
Toward
Socialism
Common
Courage
Productive
Force
Needed
Affair
Sense
Liberty
Forces
Mythical

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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.
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You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State.
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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.
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Capitalists have the tendency to move toward those countries in which there is plenty of labor available and at which labor is reasonable. And by the fact that they bring capital into these countries, they bring about a trend toward higher wage rates.
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Where there is no market economy, the best intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.
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The most successful businessmen were often uneducated when measured by the scholastic standards of the teaching profession. But they were equal to their social function of adjusting production to the most urgent demand. Because of these merits the consumers chose them for business leadership.
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This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.
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Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.
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The capitalist system of production is an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people's mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what
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Inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism.
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Progressive taxation of income and profits means that precisely those parts of the income which people would have saved and invested are taxed away
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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.
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The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war. The wars of our age are not at variance with popular economic doctrines they are, on the contrary, the inescapable result of a consistent application of these doctrines.
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Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs.
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The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs.
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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.
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