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Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.

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
Government
Applying
Take
Ink
Make
Worthless
Like
Commodity
Institution
Valuable
Institutions
Paper

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A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
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If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.
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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.
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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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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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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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Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.
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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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The continued existence of society depends upon private property.
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Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange.
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Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.
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Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.
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The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.
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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.
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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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The living is not perfect because it is liable to change the dead is not perfect because it does not live.
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The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness.
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Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.
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The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. The market is a process, actuated by the interplay of the actions of the various individuals cooperating under the division of labor.
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A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil he is always self-made.
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