The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.
The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy.
Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.
The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.
The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by governments.
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.
Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.
Every socialist is a disguised dictator.
Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.
Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.
He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.
All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.
The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.
The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.
The struggle for freedom is ultimately not resistance to autocrats or oligarchs but resistance to the despotism of public opinion.
Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.
Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.
Liberty is always freedom from the government.
Economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings and actions.
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.
Depressions and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market but by government interference in the economy.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.
If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.
The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers.
The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial-that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.
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