Quotes from Bureaucracy

By Ludwig Von Mises (1944)

• In the capitalist system all designing and planning is based on the market prices. Without them all the projects and blueprints of the engineers would be a mere academic pastime. They would demonstrate what could be done and how. But they would not be in a position to determine whether the realization of a certain project would really increase material well-being or whether it would not, by withdrawing scarce factors of production from other lines, jeopardize the satisfaction of more urgent needs, that is, of needs considered more urgent by the consumers.#
  Economics
• The ultimate basis of economic calculation is the valuation of all consumers’ goods on the part of all the people. It is true that these consumers are fallible and that their judgment is sometimes misguided. We may assume that they would appraise the various commodities differently if they were better instructed. However, as human nature is, we have no means of substituting the wisdom of an infallible authority for people’s shallowness.#
  Economics
• What many people nowadays consider an evil is not bureaucracy as such, but the expansion of the sphere in which bureaucratic management is applied.#
  Politics
• It is true that the appraisal of the various commodities sold and bought on the market depends no less on discretion, that is, on the discretion of the consumers. But as the consumers are a vast body of different people, an anonymous and amorphous aggregation, the judgments they pass are congealed into an impersonal phenomenon, the market price, and are thus severed from their arbitrary origin.#
  Economics
• No progress and no reforms can be expected in a state of affairs where the first step is to obtain the consent of the old men.#
  PoliticsLaw
• Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.#
  DemocracyPolitics
• The characteristic feature of a caste is its rigidity. The social classes, as Marx exemplified them in calling the capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the wage earners distinct classes, are characterized by their flexibility.#
  CultureLaw