If the market is left to its own devices, the price will be an accurate reflection of what something is worth at a given point in time. When the government intervenes, it forces the prices to lie: the signals about the costs and benefits of different actions will be distorted.
"No benefit results from the mere expenditure of the money [on public works], nor the employment of the workmen employed on its construction; for, if this money had remained in the hands of the contributors, it would either directly or indirectly have put in activity an equal quantity of industry."
The Frederick L. Maier Lecture, recorded at Mises University 2008.
Government subsidies mean that there will be more production in the geographic space defined by the GO Zone, but this is not net new production.
This audio essay is narrated by Gennady Stolyarov, II.
They tell us how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace.
Mises's great insight was that economic reasoning has its foundation in just this understanding of action; and that the status of economics as a sort of applied logic derives from the status of the action-axiom as an a priori-true synthetic proposition.
Unemployment in the unhampered market is always voluntary.
Monetary calculation is the guiding principle of action in any society with a division of labor.
