Mises Daily

All those hoping to reap the inequitable riches from yet another highly inflationary year — a much less arduous task than that of creating real wealth or generating genuine income — will just have to hope he is right.

We free marketeers get exhausted saying it so many times, but here goes: Foreign imports do not destroy jobs on net. Government interventions against international trade do not promote employment. Everyone can get hired in a free labor market, so there is no issue of "providing jobs."

The evidence is only that jobholders and jobseekers are alike subject to a law which nature, perhaps unfortunately, has made universal. Like all the rest of us, they tend always to satisfy their needs and desires with the least possible exertion.

Either libertarians would have to painfully make their way to developing an interest in history, current affairs, economics, political philosophy — in short, the real world, or else they would have to descend into a blissful silence (blissful that is, for the rest of us.)

The second noticeable consequence of the state's activity in everybody's business but its own is that its own business is monstrously neglected.

Ideas matter. More than we know. Why haven't we won? Because we are not doing enough and our ranks are not big enough. We need to do what we are doing on ever-grander scales. We need to make ever-better arguments on behalf of liberty. And we need to have patience, just like the prohibitionists and socialists had patience to see their agenda to the end.

In a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are 'good' in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors.

Trick names of this sort corrupt the language and confuse thought. It would hardly clarify matters to call a handout a “negative deprivation” or having your pocket picked “receiving a negative gift.”

There is no absolute monetary stability, never has been, and never can be. Economic life is a process of perpetual change.

A wholly voluntary economy results in the greatest general welfare to all the persons of that society.