Quotes from Planning for Freedom

By Ludwig Von Mises (1952)

• The main error of widespread pessimism is the belief that the destructionist ideas and policies of our age sprang from the proletarians and are a “revolt of the masses”. In fact, the masses, precisely because they are not creative and do not develop philosophies of their own, follow leaders. The ideologies which produced all the mischiefs and catastrophes of our century are not an achievement of the mob. They are the feats of pseudo scholars and pseudo intellectuals. They were propagated from the chairs of universities and from the pulpits; they were disseminated by the press, by novels, by plays, by movies, and the radio.#Quoted in Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (1961)
• If the present tax rates had been in effect from the beginning of our century, many who are millionaires today would live under more modest circumstances. But all those new branches of industry which supply the masses with articles unheard of before would operate, if at all, on a much smaller scale, and their products would be beyond the reach of the common man.#
  Tax
• If one rejects laissez faire on account of man’s fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reasons also reject every kind of government action.#
  Politics
• There is no other standard of what is morally good and morally bad than the effects produced by conduct upon social cooperation.#
  Ethics
• [The socialist] assumes that the only thing required is to continue in the various plants production of those goods they are producing at the moment of the socialization in the ways they were hitherto produced. No account is taken of the necessity to adjust production daily anew to perpetually changing conditions. The dilettante-socialist does not comprehend that a socialization effected fifty years ago would not have socialized the structure of business as it exists today but a very different structure. he does not give a thought to the enormous effort that is needed in order to transform business again and again to render the best possible service.#
  EconomicsCapital