Ludwig von Mises Quotes

Inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their effort on monetary policy.

It should not be the government running the economy.

Conservatives have long argued, correctly, that 'fine-tuning' the economy is a chimera, but that argument seems to have disappeared from the conservative handbook.

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .

Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.

When you give government the power to control the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself.

We shall take whatever action is necessary to contain the growth of the money supply. The government, unlike so many of its predecessors, will face up to economic realities.

Conservatives brayed that government should stay out of the private sector; liberals bleated for nationalizing the banks.

When you have a perfect free market, it's difficult to predict the future. But when you have a market that is disturbed by government manipulations and money-printing, it's impossible to make any predictions.

And you can't have a prosperous economy when the government is way overspending, raising tax rates, printing too much money, over regulating and restricting free trade. It just can't be done.

What got us out of the depression was capitalism, and we would have gotten out a lot quicker had the government not intervened.

Who controls the issuance of money controls the government!

The Tea Party folks may be sincere, loyal citizens, but their notions about how the economy works are exactly that: mere notions. Their core notion is that government needs to do nothing more than get out of the way of business in order for the economy to boom and bloom.

If we have an economic crisis in the Western world it's because the government makes up 50 percent or more of the economy. This is a cancer that is taking away people's freedom.

I don't think that much change comes from economists. I think it comes more from political realities. Probably the two giants of the 20th century, who actually did shift government policy in the U.S. and around the world, were John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. I don't see anybody in our system who is at that level of influence.

I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets. I think that is not true anymore. I was a Republican at a time when I felt like there was a problem that the markets were under a lot more strain. It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role.

Either you believe in markets, or you believe in government.

Shall we have in this country legal-tender paper issued by the Government, or shall the people depend upon banking corporations for their circulating medium! Shall the Government or the banking corporations control the volume of the currency?

I spent my whole life in the private sector, 25 years in the private sector. I understand that when government takes more money out of the hands of people, it makes it more difficult for them to buy things. If they can't buy things, the economy doesn't grow. If the economy doesn't grow, we don't put Americans to work.

Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.

Keynes eliminated economic theory's ancient role as spoilsport for inflationist and statist schemes, leading a new generation of economists on to academic power and to political pelf and privilege.

Government intervention only hurts; it doesn't help.

Despite the impression created by some economic pundits, the U.S. economy is not a delicate little machine that needs to be fine-tuned with exact precision by benevolent policymakers to keep from breaking down.

Governments have persistently tried their best to promote, encourage, and expand the circulation of bank and government paper, and to discourage the people's use of gold itself.

Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.