Quote

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.

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
State
Substitute
Less
Exchange
Action
Substitutes
States
Affairs
Willfully
Needs
Libertarian
Alteration
Attempt
Alterations
Affair
Induced
Call
Satisfactory

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On the unhampered market there prevails an irresistible tendency to employ every factor of production for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers. If the government interfered with this process, it can only impair satisfaction it can never improve it.
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The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.
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There prevails on a free labor market a tendency toward full employment.
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It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.
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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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Aggressors cannot wage total war without introducing Socialism.
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The better an entrepreneur succeeds, the more is he vilified and themore is he soaked by taxation.
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All those evils which the [liberals] interpret as evidence of the failure of capitalism, are the necessary outcome of interference with the market.
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Some experts have declared that it is necessary to tax the people until it hurts. I disagree with these sadists.
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Liberty is always freedom from the government.
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Thoughts and ideas are not phantoms. They are real things. Although intangible and immaterial, they are factors in bringing about changes in the realm of tangible and material things.
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It is impossible to describe any human action if one does not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as well as in the end his response is aiming at.
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Capital is not a free gift of God or of nature. It is the outcome of a provident restriction of consumption on the part of man. It is created and increased by saving and maintained by the abstention from dissaving.
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Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.
Ludwig von Mises
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The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but on the forcible appropriation of the fruits of others' labor.
Ludwig von Mises
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The comparatively greater prosperity of the United States is an outcome of the fact that the New Deal did not come in 1900 or 1910, but only in 1933.
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Servile labour disappeared because it could not stand the competition of free labour its un-profitability sealed its doom in the market economy.
Ludwig von Mises
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Capital does not 'beget profit' as Marx thought. The capital goods as such are dead things that in themselves do not accomplish anything. If they are utilized according to a good idea, profit results. If they are utilized according to a mistaken idea, no profit or losses result. It is the entrepreneurial decision that creates either profit or loss.
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where Nietzsche's response to the equation of socialism and morality was to question the value of morality, at least as it had been customarily understood, economists like Mises and Hayek pursued a different path, one Nietzsche would never have dared to take: they made the market the very expression of morality.
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The consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.
Ludwig von Mises