Ludwig von Mises Quotes

Capital brings forth living offspring, or at the least, lays the golden eggs.

If you put a ten dollar bill under the rug instead of spending it, that is capital formation. It represents ten dollars' worth of something that might have been immediately consumed, but wasn't.

You pay more in wages, get more in in tax, you get people living a higher standard, you get more money. It's a kind of circle.

Sometimes, we use the term 'growth' as a number and sometimes as an abstraction, but the underlying implication is always that, if the country grows at a certain rate, at the end there will be a pot of gold for everyone.

I know how to make stuff happen, how to create wealth, create jobs, create investment.

These will be fabulous investments and will make millions of more people rich.

I believe wealth should be in the hands of those who know how to create more wealth.

lt is the interest of the commercial world that wealth should be found everywhere.

A rising economic tide not only raises all ships but prevents them from bumping into each other.

A prolonged and massive increase in aggregate wealth per capita has taken place over several centuries.

An individual or a group of individuals might of course decide at any time that they would like to invest capital with the objective of acquiring still more capital. But, before a certain moment in historical time, it had never been easy for such individuals to do this successfully.

Just spreading the money around - that isn't what makes people better off; it's having more and better goods and services.

Business success isn't just a selfish aim. Profits spread beyond those who make them and bring jobs and prosperity.

There is but one means available to improve the material conditions of mankind: to accelerate the growth of capital accumulated as against the growth in population. The greater the amount of capital invested per head of the worker, the more and better goods can be produced and consumed. This is what capitalism, the much abused profit system, has brought about and brings about daily anew. Yet, most present-day governments and political parties are eager to destroy this system.

Capitalism gave the world what it needed, a higher standard of living for a steadily increasing number of people.

The only real cure for poverty is production.

The accumulation of capital involves the expansion of value over time.

If people do not consume their whole incomes, the non-consumed surplus can be invested, it increases the amount of capital goods available and thereby makes it possible to embark upon projects which could not be executed before.

Big money seeks out the company of its own, for purposes of reproduction.

The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

I'm big into stocks. I've invested in a lot of stocks. One day I was talking to my accountant, and he was like, "Yo, what if I could turn a million dollars into $20 million?"

The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible. Among men of good will such an aim can be taken for granted. The real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.

The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending