Mises Daily

Much is heard these days of the distinction between human rights and property rights. But far from being in conflict, property rights are the most basic of all human rights.

According to Say, all productive enterprises are created by individuals in society, not by the state. It is the responsibility of productive enterprise to support the continuity of families.

Antipoverty "strategies" like mandatory overtime pay, state-protected unionization, and opposition to labor-saving devices only serve to increase the cost of living for poor and rich alike.

In our time the most powerful theocratic parties are opposed to the world's great religions. Today's theocrats believe they alone can plan society and that they are enlightened.

Of course some of the private defense agencies will become criminal. But in a stateless society there would be no regular, legalized channel for crime and aggression.

It took centuries to end the idea that taxes kept the privileged class in comfort and financed their wars. But now we're told taxes = civilization.

It is the business of legal violence to defend persons and their property from violent attack, from molestation or appropriation of their property without their consent.

How was the Keynesian Revolution accomplished? The old fallacies were dressed up by Keynes in such a wilderness of pretentious jargon, that the Keynesian disciples claimed to be the only ones able to understand the Master.

The concept of capital is the fundamental concept of economic calculation, the foremost mental tool of the conduct of affairs in the market economy. Its correlative is the concept of income.

Utilitarian economists, grounded on no ethical theory of property rights, can only fall back on defending whatever status quo may happen to exist.