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
War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.
Interpretation
War does not lead to economic prosperity; destruction does not create wealth.
Ludwig Von Mises argues that war cannot spur economic growth because the destruction of goods and resources eliminates value rather than creating it. In other words, while wartime spending may temporarily boost certain sectors, the overall impact of destruction is detrimental to the economy and does not lead to genuine wealth creation.
In practice
In a debate on fiscal policy, one might cite this quote to argue against military spending as a means to stimulate the economy.
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.
If you don't talk about families, then it's easy to disembody subprime mortgages and asset securitization and unemployment rates without remembering that every one of those numbers is a million families.
The economic dynamic in Zimbabwe is perversely robust: while ordinary people suffer, black-market dealers and people with foreign bank accounts prosper, making them powerful stakeholders in the perpetuation of devastating economic policies.
Thus, the same blow that strikes interest down will send wages up.
Passive commerce . . . should thus . . . [compel us] to content ourselves with the first price of our commodities, and to see the profits of our trade snatched from us, to enrich our enemies and persecutors. That unequalled spirit of enterprise . . . an inexhaustible mine of national wealth, would be stifled and lost; and poverty and disgrace would overspread a country, which, with wisdom, might make herself the admiration and envy of the world.
In Europe and the United States the two decades following the Second World War will for long be remembered as a very good time, the time when capitalism really worked. Everywhere in the industrialized countries production increased. Unemployment was everywhere low. Prices were nearly stable. When production lagged and unemployment rose, governments intervened to take up the slack, as Keynes had urged.
Markets as well as mobs respond to human emotions; markets as well as mobs can be inflamed to their own destruction.
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