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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.

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
Understand
Economics
History
Challenge
Facts
Pay
Thought
Challenges
Power
Economic
Doe
Impossible
Attention
Fact
Conceit

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History has witnessed the failure of many endeavors to impose peace by war, cooperation by coercion, unanimity by slaughtering dissidents.... A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.
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In a game there are winners and losers. But a business deal is always advantageous for both parties. If both the buyer and the seller were not to consider the transaction as the most advantageous action they could choose under the prevailing conditions, they would not enter into the deal.
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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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The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
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Every innovation makes its appearance as a 'luxury' of the few well-to-do. After industry has become aware of it, the luxury then becomes a 'necessity' for all.
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All people, entrepreneurs as well as non-entrepreneurs, look askance upon any profits earned by other people. Envy is a common weakness of men. People are loath to acknowledge the fact that they themselves could have earned profits if they had displayed the same foresight and judgment the successful businessman did.
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Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator
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No one can escape the influence of a prevailing ideology.
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The tow pillars of democratic government are the primacy of the law and the budget.
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The prevailing legal and moral views of a time are held not only by those whom they benefit but by those, too, who appear to suffer from them. Their domination is expressed in that fact- that the people from whom they claim sacrifice accept them.
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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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The tricks and artifices of advertising are available to the seller of the better product no less than to the seller of the poorer product. But only the former enjoys the advantage derived from the better quality of his product.
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The early industrialists were for the most part men who had their origin in the same social strata from which their workers came. They lived very modestly, spent only a fraction of their earnings for their households and put the rest back into the business.
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Business is a means- the only means- to increase the quantity of goods available for preserving life and rendering it more agreeable.
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Capitalism has improved the standard of living of the wage earners to an unprecedented extent. The average American family enjoys today amenities of which, only a hundred years ago, not even the richest nabobs dreamed.
Ludwig von Mises
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Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.
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Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest it is the control of the means for all our ends.
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Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He sets an example of luxury that awakens in the multitude a consciousness of new needs and gives industry the incentive to fulfill them.
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The system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism.
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Every step by which an individual substitutes concerted action for isolated action results in an immediate and recognizable improvement in his conditions. The advantages derived from peaceful cooperation and division of labor are universal.
Ludwig von Mises