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Action based on reason, action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.

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
Action
Ends
Based
Reason
Therefore
Understood
Greatest
Pleasure
Acting
Individual

More quotes by Ludwig von Mises

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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.
Ludwig von Mises
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Where there is no market economy, the best intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.
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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 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.
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During the 2300 years since Plato, very little opposition has been registered to his ideas.
Ludwig von Mises
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Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.
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The idea of Socialism is at once grandiose and simple. . .We may say, in fact, that it is one of the most ambitious creations of the human spirit, . . .so magnificent, so daring, that it has rightly aroused the greatest admiration. If we wish to save the world from barbarism we have to refute Socialism, but we cannot thrust it carelessly aside.
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Under capitalism everybody is the architect of his own fortune.
Ludwig von Mises
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Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.
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Taxes are necessary. But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful capitalists and entrepreneurs.
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The average American worker enjoys amenities for which Croesus, Crassus, the Medici, and Louis XIV would have envied him.
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The first socialists were the intellectuals they, and not the masses, are the backbone of Socialism.
Ludwig von Mises
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All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.
Ludwig von Mises
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Profits are the driving force of the market economy. The greater the profits, the better the needs of the consumers are supplied... He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.
Ludwig von Mises
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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.
Ludwig von Mises
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The consumers suffer when the laws of the country prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from expanding the sphere of their activities. What made some enterprises develop into big business was precisely their success in filling best the demand of the masses.
Ludwig von Mises
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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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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.
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The tow pillars of democratic government are the primacy of the law and the budget.
Ludwig von Mises
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Every restriction of trade creates vested interests that are from then on opposed to its removal.
Ludwig von Mises