Ludwig von Mises Quotes

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand t...

When a country has substituted credit money or fiat money for metallic money, because the legal equa...

One variety of the balance-of-payments theory attempts to distinguish between the importation of nec...

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful a...

It is not the poverty of individuals and the community, not indebtedness to foreign nations, not the...

Speculation does not determine prices; it has to accept the prices that are determined in the market...

The function of money is to facilitate the business of the market by acting as a common medium of ex...

According to the current view, the maintenance of sound monetary conditions is only possible with a ...

It is true that the speculator may happen to go astray in his estimate of future prices. What is usu...

The exchange-value of money is the anticipated use-value of the things that can be obtained with it.

It will be the obvious result of this that the prices of the goods concerned will rise, and that the...

Restrictionism, however, demands positive sacrifices from the national exchequer when it is carried ...

If the possessor of a units of money receives h additional units, then it is not at all true to say ...

But even though questions of currency policy are never more than questions of the value of money, th...

The agents of etatism have certainly not been lacking in zeal and energy. But, for all this, economi...

Inflationism is that monetary policy that seeks to increase the quantity of money.

What is thus improperly regarded as profit, instead of as part of capital, is consumed by the entrep...

If we disregard the exchange of present goods for future goods, and restrict our considerations for ...

Fiscal considerations have led to the promulgation of a theory that attributes to the minting author...

When the price of coal falls because production has increased while demand has remained unaltered, t...

The social displacements that occur as consequences of variations in the value of money result solel...

Every separate economic agent maintains a stock of money that corresponds to the extent and intensit...

The supplementary quantity of gold that streams from it into commerce goes at first to the owners of...

It must be pointed out that the level of the total stock of money and of the value of the money unit...

Paper money in time of war, the new notes will first go into the pockets of the war contractors. 'As...

As a rule, however, an increase in the value of money spreads only gradually. The first of those who...

All that the State need do, and can do, in order to preserve the monetary system undisturbed, is to ...

The government desires to purchase; it desires to use the market, not to disorganize it. But the off...

They did not suffer shipwreck because the entrepreneurs were not public-spirited, as the socialist-e...

THE economic consequences of fluctuations in the objective exchange-value of money have such importa...

Restrictionistic ideas have never met with any measure of popular sympathy except after a time of mo...

But there are nevertheless three conclusions that seem to follow from our critical examination of th...

When the value of money is increased, then those are enriched who at the time possess credit money o...

The objective exchange-value of money which rules in the market to-day is derived from yesterday's u...

A metallic money, the augmentation or diminution of the quantity of metal available for which is ind...

Any intervention, such as that of the German Reichsbank in the Spring of 1923, in which only a small...

The State does not govern the market; in the market in which products are exchanged it may quite pos...

An attempt is sometimes made to demonstrate the desirability of measures directed against speculatio...

The marginal utility of money to any individual, i.e., the marginal utility derivable from the goods...

Etatism, as a theory, is the doctrine of the omnipotence of the State, and, as a policy, the attempt...

For when the Law of Price declares that a good actually commands a particular price, and explains wh...

a variation in the objective exchange-value of money can arise only when a force is exerted in one d...

Before it was usual to acquire goods in the market, not for personal consumption, but simply in orde...

Etatism by no means aims at the formal transformation of all ownership of the means of production in...

That policy which aims at raising the objective exchange-value of money is called, after the most im...

There is no room at all for independent enterprise under any variety of State Socialism. Prices are ...

Every word of etatistic thought is contradicted by the doctrines of sociology and economics; this is...

That the social life of human beings is subject to definite limitations; that it is governed by a se...

History likewise shows that sometimes the 'monetary standard of the victors' can prove to be very ba...

Where the currency depreciation is a result of government inflation carried out by the issue of note...

The error in this conclusion may be most simply demonstrated by means of an actual example. Let us s...

For the etatist, money is a creature of the State, and the esteem in which money is held is the econ...

Neither has the wealth of a country any bearing on the valuation of its money. Nothing is more erron...

The oldest and most popular instrument of etatistic monetary policy is the official fixing of maximu...

The older theories, which started from an erroneous conception of the social demand for money, could...

Let us merely discuss the question, what consequences would necessarily follow if, ceteris paribus, ...

The attempt to restrain prices within limits has to be given up. A government that sets out to aboli...

The core of the doctrine consists in the proposition that the supply of money and the demand for it ...

For once the commodities have been sold that were already on the market when their price was authori...

It is impossible to say how far the present value of money depends on its monetary employment and ho...

Let us now leave the example of the isolated State and turn our attention to the international movem...

What is called storing money is a way of using wealth. The uncertainty of the future makes it seem a...

To a naive observer, money made out of precious metal was 'sound money' because the piece of preciou...

We have already examined one of the objections that have been brought against the Quantity Theory; t...

The first value of money was clearly the value which the goods used as money possessed (thanks to th...

Even if index numbers cannot fulfill the demands that theory has to make, they can still, in spite o...

If the objective exchange-value of money must always be linked with a pre-existing market exchange-r...

The sums of money collected in hoards lie there idle, waiting for the moment when commerce needs the...

All index-number systems, so far as they are intended to have a greater significance for monetary th...

Economic history shows us a continual increase in the demand for money. The characteristic feature o...

The aim was to regulate the value of money by increasing or diminishing the quantity of it. The effe...

But here again it must be observed that this is a matter of a variation brought about through dynami...

Money is not indefinitely divisible. Even with the assistance of money-substitutes for expressing fr...

Under certain conditions, index numbers may do very useful service as an aid to investigation into t...

The moneyprice of any commodity in any place, under the assumption of completely unrestricted exchan...

Under bilateral competition, market-price is determined within a range whose upper limit is set by t...

Let us assume that a man gets half his income in the form of interest-bearing securities and half in...

To measure is to determine the ratio of one quantity to another which is invariable or assumed to be...

There are two parts to the problem of measuring the objective exchange-value of money. First we have...

We can easily imagine a monetary organization which, by the exclusive use of notes or clearing-house...

The jurist is totally unacquainted with the problem of the value of money; he knows nothing of fluct...

Local differences in the prices of commodities whose natures are technologically identical are to be...

Hence, the statement that the cost of living is different in different localities only means that th...

He who cares to go to the trouble of demonstrating the uselessness of index numbers for monetary the...

To recapitulate: the exchange-ratio subsisting between commodities and money is everywhere the same....

When jurists and business men assert that the depreciation of money has a very great influence on al...

It is true that there are important differences between that money which plays the chief part in dom...

No individual and no nation need fear at any time to have less money than it needs. Government measu...

If we compare two static economic systems, which differ in no way from one another except that in on...

For hundreds, even thousands, of years, people completely failed to see that variations in the objec...

In the case of money, subjective use-value and subjective exchange-value coincide. Both are derived ...

The collapse of an inflation policy carried to its extreme -- as in the United States in 1781 and in...

But when States did debase the coinage, it was always from purely fiscal motives. The government nee...

At one time, this gave rise to the question of whether the legal validity of the money was determine...

So far as variations in the objective exchange-value of money are foreseen, they influence the terms...

It has been proposed that monetary liabilities should be settled in terms of gold and not according ...

The entrepreneur who is reckoning in terms of a currency with a stable value is unable to compete wi...

When individuals are exchanging present goods against future goods they do not take account in their...

Naive inflationism demands an increase in the quantity of money without suspecting that this will di...

If the State uses this power systematically in order to force the community to accept a particular s...

Fiat-money! Let the State 'create' money, and make the poor rich, and free them from the bonds of th...