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
Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of private ownership in achieving a better quality of life.
Ludwig Von Mises argues that in order to prioritize life, happiness, and well-being, one must uphold and defend private ownership of production resources. This reflects a libertarian philosophy, suggesting that individual ownership and freedom are fundamental to achieving progress and fulfillment in society.
In practice
During a debate about economic systems, one might use this quote to advocate for capitalism.
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.
The forms are evanescent; but the spirit, being in the Lord and of the Lord, is immortal and omnipresent.
Evil is not any superhuman, but it is HUMAN.
Every sensation shares the same characteristic: it arises and passes away, arises and passes away. It is this arising and passing that we have to experience through practice, not just accept as truth because Buddha said so, not just accept because intellectually it seems logical enough to us. We must experience sensation’s nature, understand its flux, and learn not to react to it.
[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.
We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.
The same relation exists between merchant and pirate, who for a long period are one and the same person: where the one function appears to them inadvisable, they exercise the other.
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