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

More quotes by Ludwig von Mises

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It is certain that many intellectuals envy the higher income of prosperous businessmen and that these feelings drive them toward socialism. They believe that the authorities of a socialist commonwealth would pay them higher salaries than those that they earn under capitalism.
Ludwig von Mises
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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.
Ludwig von Mises
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Nothing, however, is as ill founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.
Ludwig von Mises
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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.
Ludwig von Mises
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Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe.
Ludwig von Mises
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Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.
Ludwig von Mises
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War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings...but no one has for those reasons yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.
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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Inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism.
Ludwig von Mises
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Men are fighting one another because they are convinced that the extermination and liquidation of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.
Ludwig von Mises
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It is always the individual who thinks. Society does not think any more than it eats or drinks. The evolution of human reasoning from the naive thinking of primitive man to the more subtle thinking of modern science took place within society. However, thinking itself is always an achievement of individuals.
Ludwig von Mises
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The truth is that the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody...It is not in the power of the government to make everybody more prosperous.
Ludwig von Mises
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What is needed for a sound expansion of production is additional capital goods, not money or fiduciary media. The credit expansion is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse.
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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If, as is generally the case, the heirs are not equal to the demands which life makes on an entrepreneur, the inherited wealth rapidly vanishes.
Ludwig von Mises
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Big business always serve - directly or indirectly - the masses.
Ludwig von Mises
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Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
Ludwig von Mises
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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.
Ludwig von Mises
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In talking about equality and asking vehemently for its realization, nobody advocates a curtailment of his own present income.
Ludwig von Mises
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There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
Ludwig von Mises