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In the world of reality, life, and human action there is no such thing as interests independent of ideas, preceding them temporarily and logically. What a man considers his interest is the result of his ideas.

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
Considers
Human
Interests
Humans
Result
Thing
Independent
Men
Results
Life
Interest
Preceding
World
Action
Logically
Reality
Temporarily

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There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about.
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The democracy of the market consists in the fact that people themselves make their choices and that no dictator has the power to force them to submit to his value judgments.
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The recurrence of periods of depression and mass unemployment has discredited capitalism in the opinion of injudicious people. Yet these events are not the outcome of the operation of the free market. They are on the contrary the result of well-intentioned but ill-advised government interference with the market.
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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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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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Mankind does not drink alcohol because there are breweries, distilleries, and vineyards men brew beer, distill spirits, and grow grapes because of the demand for alcoholic drinks.
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The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression.
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An essential point in the social philosophy of interventionism is the existence of an inexhaustible fund which can be squeezed forever. The whole system of interventionism collapses when the fountain is drained off: The Santa Clause principle liquidates itself.
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The greater productivity of work under the division of labor is a unifying influence. It leads men to regard each other as comrades in a joint struggle for welfare, rather than as competitors in a struggle for existence. It makes friends out of enemies, peace out of war, society out of individuals.
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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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Do the American voters know that the unprecedented improvement in their standard of living that the last hundred years brought was the result of the steady rise in the per-head quota of capital invested? Do they realize that every measure leading to capital decumulation jeopardizes their prosperity?
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Society is only possible on these terms, that the individual finds therein a strengthening of his own ego and his own will.
Ludwig von Mises
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If the government objects to monopoly prices for new inventions, it should stop granting patents.
Ludwig von Mises
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The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties were eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise.
Ludwig von Mises
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A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.
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What makes the existence and the evolution of society possible is precisely the fact that peaceful cooperation under the social division of labor in the long run best serves the selfish concerns of all individuals. The eminence of the market society is that its whole functioning and operation is the consummation of this principle.
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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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There is no such thing as a just and fair method of exercising the tremendous power that interventionism puts into the hands of the legislature and the executive.
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The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.
Ludwig von Mises
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Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator
Ludwig von Mises