Taking It for Granted

"Capitalism, says Marx, unthinkingly repeating the fables of the eulogists of the Middle Ages, has an inevitable tendency to impoverish the workers more and more. The truth is that capitalism has poured a horn of plenty upon the masses of wage earners who frequently did all they could to sabotage the adoption of those innovations which render their life more agreeable. How uneasy an American worker would be if he were forced to live in the style of a medieval lord and to miss the plumbing facilities and the other gadgets he simply takes for granted!" —Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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The Value of Selfishness

"The welfare school pretends not only to stand for the interests of the whole of society as against the selfish interests of profit-seeking business; it contends moreover that it takes into account the lasting secular interests of the nation as against the short-term concerns of speculators, promoters, and capitalists who are exclusively committed to profiteering and do not bother about the future of the whole of society. This second claim is, of course, irreconcilable with the emphasis laid by the school upon short-run policies as against long-run concerns. However, consistency is not one...

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Mises on Equality and Inequality

"The liberal champions of equality under the law were fully aware of the fact that men are born unequal and that it is precisely their inequality that generates social cooperation and civilization. Equality under the law was in their opinion not designed to correct the inexorable facts of the universe and to make natural inequality disappear. It was, on the contrary, the device to secure for the whole of mankind the maximum of benefits it can derive from it. Henceforth no man-made institutions should prevent a man from attaining that station in which he can best serve his fellow citizens."...

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TGIF: Police-State Progressives

TGIF: Police-State Progressives

Progressives see themselves as, well, progressive. But they aren't. Even at their best, in opposing the national security state, they support massive government power in other realms of life. At heart they are social engineers. They seek a "moral equivalent of war," that is, regimentation without bloodshed. They are even anti-democratic when it suits them. We can see all of this through the eyes of Ludwig von Mises. This is from his book Planned Chaos (1947; free audiobook here). Mises, of course, championed the unhampered market economy, or laissez-faire capitalism. He wrote: In the market...

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The Worker as Free Person

"In the market economy the worker sells his services as other people sell their commodities. The employer is not the employee’s lord. He is simply the buyer of services which he must purchase at their market price. Of course, like every other buyer an employer too can take liberties. But if he resorts to arbitrariness in hiring or discharging workers, he must foot the bill. An employer or an employee entrusted with the management of a department of an enterprise is free to discriminate in hiring workers, to fire them arbitrarily, or to cut down their wages below the market rate. But in...

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Labor as Commodity

For the individual actor, "as for everyone, other people’s labor as offered for sale on the market is nothing but a factor of production. Man deals with other people’s labor in the same way that he deals with all scarce material factors of production. He appraises it according to the principles he applies in the appraisal of all other goods. The height of wage rates is determined on the market in the same way in which the prices of all commodities are determined. In this sense we may say that labor is a commodity. The emotional associations which people, under the influence of Marxism,...

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