Ludwig von Mises Quotes

For it is an essential difference between capitalist and socialist production that under capitalism men provide for themselves, while under Socialism they are provided for.

Capitalism means free enterprise, sovereignty of the consumers in economic matters, and sovereignty of the voters in political matters. Socialism means full government control of every sphere of the individuals life and the unrestricted supremacy of the government in its capacity as central board of production management.

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.

Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.

I am a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology.

There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.

Capitalism works better than it sounds, while socialism sounds better than it works.

Socialism, technically, is when the government owns the means of production. And they don't yet. I mean they own a couple car companies and they're mucking that up. But fascism is where the private sector still owns businesses but the government runs it.

In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.

In America, we don't, in daily discourse, use the words 'capitalism' or 'socialism.' They've been kind of nonexistent words, I would say, amongst the general public.

Our Soviet society is socialist because private ownership of factories, plants, land, banks and means of transportation has been abolished in our country, and replaced by public ownership.

Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind.

If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization.

I don't believe government should take over, you know, the grocery store down the street or own the means of production.

The left hates capitalism, not because of freedom and liberty - although they do. But the primary they hate capitalism is that it is the most efficient engine to create wealth for the greatest number of people in a society that has ever been devised. Nobody's ever claimed it's perfect. Nobody's ever said it's flawless. But it's better than anything else out there, particularly anything left has to offer.

Capitalism, communism ... it's all garbage.

I think we need to think of capitalism as a very bad way of organizing communism. Much of what we do is already communism, so just expand it.

Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

A fundamental contradiction does not exist between socialism and a market economy.

All systems are capitalist. It's just a matter of who owns and controls the capital -- ancient king, dictator, or private individual. We should properly be looking at the contrast between a free market system where individuals have the right to live like kings if they have the ability to earn that right and government control of the market system such as we find today in socialist nations.

The word "Capitalism" expresses, for our age, the sum of all evil. Even the opponents of Socialism are dominated by socialist ideas.

The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible "mixed economy," thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists.

Socialism's not a word that I use. I say 'social democracy' because I don't think the government needs to own all the means of production.