Quotes from Omnipotent Government

By Ludwig Von Mises (1944)

• There can be protectionism in a country with domestic free trade, but where there is no domestic free trade protectionism is indispensable. . . . Where there is free trade, foreign competition would even in the short run frustrate the aims sought by the various measures of government intervention with domestic business. . . . The further a nation goes on the road toward public regulation and regimentation, the more it is pushed toward economic isolation.#
  PoliticsEconomics
• In this age of trade walls and migration barriers, of foreign exchange control and of expropriation of foreign capital, there are ample incentives for war and conquest. Nearly every citizen has a material interest in the nullification of measures by which foreign governments may injure him. Nearly every citizen is therefore eager to see his own country mighty and powerful, because he expects personal advantage from its military might.#
  PoliticsWar
• Absolutism was not abolished; it simply collapsed.#
  History
• The total complex of the rules according to which those at the helm [of the state] employ compulsion and coercion is called law. Yet the characteristic feature of the state is not these rules, as such, but the application or threat of violence.#
  Politics
• It is illogical to say, as many etatists do, that liberalism is hostile to or hates the state, because it is opposed to the transfer of the ownership of railroads or cotton mills to the state. If a man says that sulphuric acid does not make a good hand lotion, he is not expressing hostility to sulphuric acid as such; he is simply giving his opinion concerning the limitations of its use.#
  Politics
• Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary, it is the very means of preventing revolutions. Democracy is a system providing for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority. #
  Politics
• Human actions consist always in a choice between two goods or two evils which are not deemed equivalent. Where there is perfect equivalence, man stays neutral; and no action results.#
  Praxeology
• If our community does not beget men who have the power to make sound social principles generally acceptable, civilization is lost, whatever the system of government may be.#
  Politics
• Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.#
• It is true that many fictions and doctrines, today generally or in the main refuted and therefore called myths, have played a great role in history. But they played this role not as myths but as doctrines considered true.#
  History
• Both private property and territorial sovereignty can be traced back to a point where somebody either appropriated ownerless goods or land or violently expropriated a predecessor whose title had been based on appropriation. It would be contradictory or nonsensical to assume a “legitimate” beginning. The factual state of affairs became a legitimate one by its acknowledgment by other people. Lawfulness consists in the general acceptance of the rule that no further arbitrary appropriations or violent expropriations shall be tolerated.#
  History
• If one put together everything that various Nazis have stigmatized as Jewish, one would get the impression that our whole civilization has been the achievement only of Jews.#
  History
• The demands for liberty and self-determination on the part of the Asiatic peoples are a result of their Westernization. The natives are fighting the Europeans with ideologies borrowed from them.#
  HistoryPolitics
• The further a nation goes on the road toward public control of business, the more it is forced to withdraw from the international division of labor.#
  PoliticsEconomics