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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.

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
Doe
Give
Government
Prosperous
Take
Somebody
Giving
Everybody
Make
Cannot
Truth
Power

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He who only wishes and hopes does not interfere actively with the course of events and with the shaping of his own destiny.
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The sharper the competition, the better it serves its social function to improve economic production.
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The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.
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A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!
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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.
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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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The tow pillars of democratic government are the primacy of the law and the budget.
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Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.
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One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision.
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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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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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The state is the only institution entitled to apply coercion and compulsion and to inflict harm upon individuals. This tremendous power cannot be abandoned to the discretion of some men, however competent and clever they may deem themselves. It is necessary to restrict its application. This is the task of the laws.
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The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.
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The essence of democracy is not that everyone makes and administers laws but that lawgivers and rulers should be dependent on the people's will in such a way that they may be peaceably changed if conflict occurs.
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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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What workers must learn is that the only reason why wage rates are higher in the United States is that the per head quota of capital invested is higher.
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Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.
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The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
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Not mythical material productive forces, but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common-sense and moral courage.
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Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will
Ludwig von Mises