The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.
Ludwig Von MisesRead
Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises”. Here is an article he wrote in 1951, some two years after his magnum opus Human Action appeared, where is lays out his case in a more popular form. The money sentences are “Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis. It has happened again and again in the past, and it will happen in the future, too.
Interpretation
A prosperous economy created by monetary expansion is temporary and will inevitably lead to a crisis.
Ludwig von Mises warns that economic prosperity derived from loose monetary policies and credit expansion is deceptive and unsustainable. He argues that history has shown us time and again that such artificial prosperity will ultimately culminate in economic slumps and crises, suggesting a cyclical nature of economic bubbles created by irresponsible policies.
In practice
During a finance seminar to emphasize the risks of monetary laxity.
The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.
Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their material well-being.
Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.
The most serious dangers for American freedom and the American way of life do not come from without.
The public firm can nowhere maintain itself in free competition with the private firm; it is possible today only where it has a monopoly that excludes competition. Even that alone is evidence of its lesser economic productivity.
Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.
When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.
In a globalized economy, jobs no longer need a passport, but workers do.
Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.
What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.
Can we please agree that in the real world, corporations exist for one purpose and one purpose only - to make as much money as possible, which means cutting costs as much as possible?
Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.
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