Mises Daily

Roosevelt stands for the national government as we know it today: a vast, unfathomable bureaucratic apparatus.

When an elected official or government bureaucrat interferes with a valid, non-coerced exchange, they may appear to be helping one individual when they are actually harming a foundation of modern society; free exchange of goods and services.

The particular crises to which Keynes reacted were themselves the products of misguided government policies.

State intervention and a crushing fiscal policy made the whole empire groan under the yoke; more than once, both poor men and rich prayed that the barbarians would deliver them from it.

There are two clear and present dangers to liberty. One is known as the Left, and the other is the Right. They seek to use government to mold society into a form they seek, rather than the form that liberty achieves if society is left on its own.

The question is not whether economic progress makes people happy. Most mothers feel happier if their children survive, and most people feel happier without tuberculosis than with it.

According to the usual justification for government regulation of externalities,almost everything we do is ripe for regulation. Even worse, regulators never admit their prohibitions prevent an incalculable number of positive externalities.

The fundamental error of the interventionists is that they ignore the shortage of capital goods.

It is not the people we elect who are in charge. They are only the human face on the machine. If they don't know this before the election, they quickly discover it after the election.

People do not save and accumulate capital because there is interest. Interest is neither the impetus to saving nor the reward or the compensation granted for abstaining from immediate consumption. It is the ratio in the mutual valuation of present goods as against future goods.