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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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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
Political
Decades
Cannot
Otherwise
Refuted
Ideas
Argument
Dominated
Reason
Courses
Arguments
Must
Course
Catastrophe
Great
Public
Collapse
Mind
Politics
Investing
Life
Running
Rational

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Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.
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Daily experience proves clearly to everybody but the most bigoted fanatics of socialism that governmental management is inefficient and wasteful.
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Every collectivist assumes a different source for the collective will, according to his own political, religious and national convictions.
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Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.
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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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Public opinion always wants easy money, that is, low interest rates.
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Two hundred years ago, before the advent of capitalism, a man's social status was fixed from the beginning to the end of his life he inherited it from his ancestors and it never changed.
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Big business always serve - directly or indirectly - the masses.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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The sharper the competition, the better it serves its social function to improve economic production.
Ludwig von Mises
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What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.
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Marx and Engels openly declared that the progressive income tax and the death tax are 'economically untenable' and that they advocated them only because 'they necessitate further inroads' upon the capitalist system and are 'unavoidable' as a means of bringing about socialism.
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Inflation is the true opium of the people and it is administered to them by anticapitalist governments and parties.
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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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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.
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The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.
Ludwig von Mises