Ludwig von Mises Quotes

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

Capitalism has neither the capacity, nor the morality, nor the ethics to solve the problems of poverty.

Democracy is impossible in a capitalist system. Capitalism is the realm of injustice and a tyranny of the richest against the poorest.

If no man could become rich in Peru, no man could become poor.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

We’ve taken care not to penalize the wealthy but we have to redistribute some income …It is through reform that we can obtain fairness in the modern world…A reformed welfare state is the only way to obtain social justice.

Brazil was a capitalist society without capital.

No man should be made poor so another man can be made rich.

The inequality of income and fortunes is essential in capitalism.

One day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.

Free enterprise is the best economic system in the history of the world, because it is the only system where you can make poor people richer and you don't have to make rich people poor.

I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.' 'I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.

The main substantive achievement of neoliberalism has been to redistribute rather than to generate wealth and income.

Socialists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized destitution were preferable to "maldistributed" plenty. A national income that is rapidly growing in absolute terms for practically everyone will be deplored because it is making the rich richer.

Relief, or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is never the true solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift, which may mask the disease and mitigate the pain, but provides no basic cure.

Abolish plutocracy if you would abolish poverty.

If your Income Taxes go to help out the less fortunate, there could be no legitimate kick against it in the world. This is becoming the richest, and the poorest Country in the world. Why? Why, on account of an unequal distribution of the money.

The term 'income inequality' is a bit misleading because it suggests in a somewhat pejorative way that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor.

The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

It is because of capitalism that we can pay for services to poor people that we don't even know.

The combined Gross Domestic Product of forty-eight countries is less than the wealth of the three richest people in the world. Fifteen billionaires have assets greater than the total national income of Africa, south of the Sahara. Thirty-two people own more than the annual income of everyone who lives in South Asia.

It is hard to redistribute wealth of there is no productive class producing it.

Republicans look after the rich, and Democrats focus on the needs of the middle class. Neither of them looks after the poor.