Quotes from Human Action

By Ludwig Von Mises (1949)

The term entrepreneur as used by catallactic theory means: acting man exclusively seen from the aspect of the uncertainty inherent in every action.#Quoted in Steven Horwitz, Microfoundations and Macroeconomics (2000)
Economics Praxeology
The notions of stability and stabilization are empty if they do not refer to a state of rigidity and its preservation. However, this state of rigidity cannot even be thought out consistently to its ultimate logical consequences; still less can it be realized.#
Economics
Not that prices are fluctuating, but that they do not alter more quickly could fairly be deemed a problem requiring explanation.#
Economics
There is never in the whole sequence of events an instant in which the advantages derived from the increase in the amount of capital available and from technical improvements benefit the entrepreneurs only. If the wealth and the income of the other strata were to remain unaffected, these people could buy the additional products only by restricting their purchases of other products accordingly. Then the profits of one group of entrepreneurs would exactly equal the losses incurred by other groups.#
Economics
Production for profit is necessarily production for use, as profits can only be earned by providing the consumers with those things they most urgently want to use.#
Economics
A slight although continuous pressure on the gross market rate of interest as originating from a continuous increase in the quantity of gold, and also from a slight increase in the quantity of fiduciary media, which is not overdone and intensified by purposeful easy money policy, can be counterpoised by the forces of readjustment and accommodation inherent in the market economy. The adaptability of business not purposefully sabotaged by forces extraneous to the market is powerful enough to offset the effects which such slight disturbances of the loan market can possibly bring about.#
History Money
Liberals . . . believe that a man’s ability to rule proves itself better by convincing his fellow-citizens than by using force upon them. There is, of course, no guarantee that the voters will entrust office to the most competent candidate. But no other system could offer such a guarantee. If the majority of the nation is committed to unsound principles and prefers unworthy office-seekers, there is no remedy other than to try to change their mind by expounding more reasonable principles and recommending better men.#
Politics
What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really means is that war and high civilization are incompatible.#
While debt abatement improves the conditions of those who were already indebted at the moment, it impairs the position of those eager or obliged to contract new debts.#
Economics
In an economic system in which there is no private ownership of the means of production, no market, and no prices for such goods, the concepts of capital and income are mere academic postulates devoid of any practical application. In a socialist economy there are capital goods, but no capital.#
Economics Capital
Whatever freedom individuals can enjoy within the framework of social cooperation is conditional upon the concord of private gain and public weal.#
Politics
He who addresses fellow men, who wants to inform and convince them, who asks questions and answers other people’s questions, can proceed in this way only because he can appeal to something common to all men – namely, the logical structure of human reason.#
Epistemology
This state of affairs [consumer sovereignty] has been described by calling the market a democracy in which every penny gives a right to cast a ballot. It would be more correct to say that a democratic constitution is a scheme to assign to the citizens in the conduct of government the same supremacy the market economy gives them in their capacity as consumers.#
Politics Democracy
It is true, in the market the various consumers have not the same voting right. The rich cast more votes than the poorer citizens. But this inequality is itself the outcome of a previous voting process. To be rich, in a pure market economy, is the outcome of success in filling best the demands of the consumers. A wealthy man can preserve his wealth only by continuing to serve the consumers in the most efficient way.#
Economics
An excess of the total amount of profits over that of losses is a proof of the fact that there is economic progress and an improvement in the standard of living of all strata of the population. The greater this excess is, the greater is the increment in general prosperity.#
Economics
In their endeavors to strive after the highest profit attainable, entrepreneurs are forced to allocate to each branch of business only as much capital as can be employed in it without impairing the satisfaction of more urgent wants of the consumers. Thus the entrepreneurial activities are automatically, as it were, directed by the consumers’ wishes as they are reflected in the price structure of consumers’ goods.#
Economics
Entrepreneurial errors result in losses for the inefficient entrepreneurs which are counterbalanced by the profits of the efficient entrepreneurs. They make business bad for some groups of industries and good for other groups. They do not bring about a general depression of trade.#
Economics Business cycle
The appeal to justice in a debate concerning the drafting of new laws is an instance of circular reasoning. . . . It makes sense only when approving or disapproving concrete conduct from the point of view of the valid laws of the country. In considering changes in the nation’s legal system, in rewriting or repealing existing laws and writing new laws, the issue is not justice, but social expediency and social welfare. There is no such thing as an absolute notion of justice not referring to a definite system of social organization. It is, on the contrary, the social system which determines what should be deemed right and what wrong.#
Law Politics
Value judgements are not immutable and therefore a scale of value, which is abstracted from various, necessarily nonsynchronous actions of an individual, may be self-contradictory.#
Praxeology
It is not labor legislation and labor-union pressure that have shortened hours of work and withdrawn married women and children from the factories; it is capitalism, which has made the wage earner so prosperous that he is able to buy more leisure time for himself and his dependents. The nineteenth century’s labor legislation by and large achieved nothing more than to provide a legal ratification for changes which the interplay of the market factors had brought about previously. As far as it sometimes went ahead of industrial evolution, the quick advance in wealth soon made things right again. As far as the allegedly prolabor laws decreed measures which were not merely the ratification of changes already effected or the anticipation of changes to be expected in the immediate future, they hurt the material interests of the workers.#
Economics Development
Economics does not say that isolated government interference with the prices of only one commodity or a few commodities is unfair, bad, or unfeasible. It says that such interference produces results contrary to its purpose, that it makes conditions worse, not better, from the viewpoint of the government and those backing its interference.#
Economics Politics
Only in one respect can acting be constant: in preferring the more valuable to the less valuable. If the valuations change, acting must change also. #Quoted in Roderick Long, “Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action” (2001)
Praxeology
If one wants to correct their manifest unsuitableness and preposterousness by supplementing the first acts of intervention with more and more of such acts, one must go farther and farther until the market economy has been entirely destroyed.#
Economics Regulation
The scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals.#
Praxeology
The evidence that we have correctly perceived a causal relation is provided only by the fact that action guided by this knowledge results in the expected outcome.#
Science
Action and reason are congeneric and homogeneous; they may even be called two different aspects of the same thing. That reason has the power to make clear through pure ratiocination the essential features of action is a consequence of the fact that action is an offshoot of reason.#
Epistemology Praxeology
The champions of logically incompatible theories claim the same events as the proof that their point of view has been tested by experience. The truth is that the experience of a complex phenomenon – and there is no other experience in the realm of human action – can always be interpreted on the ground of various antithetic theories.#
Epistemology
The money equivalents as used in acting and in economic calculation are money prices, i.e., exchange ratios between money and other goods and services. The prices are not measured in money; they consist in money. Prices are either prices of the past or expected prices of the future. A price is necessarily a historical fact either of the past of the future. There is nothing in prices which permits one to liken them to the measurement of physical and chemical phenomena.#
Economics Money
It is not a deficiency of the system of aprioristic science that it does not convey to us full cognition of reality. Its concepts and theorems are mental tools opening the approach to a complete grasp of reality; they are, to be sure, not in themselves the totality of factual knowledge about all things.#Quoted in Gabriel Zanotti & Nicolás Cachanosky, “The Epistemological Implications of Machlups Interpretation of Mises’s Epistemology” (2015)
Praxeology Science
In endorsing the principle of equality as a political postulate nobody wants to share his own income with those who have less. When the American wage earner refers to equality, he means that the dividends of the stockholders should be given to him. He does hot suggest a curtailment of his own income for the benefit of those 95 percent of the earth’s population whose income is lower than his.#Quoted in Ludwig Lachmann, Capital, Expectations, and the Market Process (1940)
Politics
[T]he mere fact that we hypostatize the unexplained element of this behavior as a force and call it instinct does not enlarge our knowledge. We must never forget that this word instinct is nothing but a landmark to indicate a point beyond which we are unable, up to the present at least, to carry our scientific scrutiny.#
Methodology Science
Explorers and missionaries report that in Africa and Polynesia primitive man stops short at his earliest perception of things and never reasons if he can in any way avoid it. European and American educators sometimes report the same of their students. With regard to the Mossi on the Niger Levy-Brúhl quotes a missionary’s observation: “Conversation with them turns only upon women, food, and (in the rainy season) the crops.” What other subjects did many contemporaries and neighbors of Newton, Kant, and Levy-Brúhl prefer?#
Anthropology
The impracticability of measurement [in economics] is not due to the lack of technical methods for the establishment of measure. It is due to the absence of constant relations.#
Methodology Economics
Issuing money-certificates is a ruinous business if not connected with issuing fiduciary media.#
Economics Money
The mere information conveyed by technology would suffice for the performance of [economic] calculation only if all means of production – both material and human – could be perfectly substituted for one another according to definite ratios, or if they all were absolutely specific. In the former case all means of production would be fit, although according to different ratios, for the attainment of all ends whatever . . . In the latter case each means could be employed for the attainment of one end only.#
Economics Capital