Economics

What is lacking in order to make the developing countries as prosperous as the United States is only one thing: capital-and, of course, the freedom to employ it under the discipline of the market and not the discipline of the government.

Foreign investment is made in the expectation that it will not be expropriated. Nobody would invest anything if he knew in advance that somebody would expropriate his investments. At the time when these foreign investments were made in the nineteenth century, and at...

Socialism as a means for improving the condition of man is impossible.

Without capital investment, it would have been necessary for nations less developed than Great Britain to start with the methods and technology the British had started with at the beginning of the 18th century, and slowly try to imitate what the British had done.

The uniformity-of-profit principle describes a tendency, never an actually existing state of affairs.

The amount of capital invested per unit of the population is greater in the so-called advanced nations than in the developing nations.

Farm subsidies are a way the government achieves artificially high prices. They are an illustration of legal minimum prices—that is, prices below which the government prevents the producers from selling.

The operation of the tendency toward a uniform rate of profit requires that high profits be made by continuously introducing productive innovations in advance of competitors.

How the profit motive acts to make production steadily increase in a free market, and becomes an agent of continuous economic progress.

The real advocates of the consumers—their virtual agents—are businessmen seeking profit, not the leaders of groups trying to restrict the freedom of businessmen to earn profits.

In total opposition to the misguided efforts of the Marxists to contrast production for profit with “production for use,” the fact is that production for profit is production for use.

The idea that there is a third system — between socialism and capitalism, as its supporters say — a system as far away from socialism as it is from capitalism but that retains the advantages and avoids the disadvantages of each — is pure nonsense.

The uniformity-of-profit principle explains how the activities of all the separate business enterprises are harmoniously coordinated so that capital is not invested excessively in the production of some items while leaving the production of other items unprovided for.

The best way to begin to understand the functioning of the price system, and thus the full nature of the dependence of the division of labor on capitalism, is by understanding the following very simple and fundamental principle. Namely, there is a tendency in a free market toward the establishment of a uniform rate of profit on capital invested in all the different branches of industry.

Analyzing interventionism during the First World War in Germany and England.

Let us consider one example of interventionism, very popular in many countries and tried again and again by many governments, especially in times of inflation. I refer to price control. Governments usually resort to price control when they have inflated the money...

Bitcoin Volatility is a Feature, Not a Bug.

four ways in which the lives of those of us in the modern, capitalist world differ categorically from the lives of almost everyone until just a few centuries ago.

Eighty years ago, in the midst of the Second World War, Austrian-born economist Joseph A. Schumpeter published one of his most famous books, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). A central question that he asked and tried to answer was, “Can Capitalism Survive?”

A famous, very often quoted phrase says: "That government is best, which governs least." I do not believe this to be a correct description of the functions of a good government. Government ought to do all the things for which it is needed and for which it was...

The fact is that economic calculation, and therefore all technological planning, is possible only if there are money prices, not only for consumer goods but also for the factors of production.

Ludwig Von Mises’s devastating critique of why a socialist economic system must always be inferior to capitalism.

We’ve reached the end of the road and found that the people who must ultimately pay for unlimited government are us. And whether through taxes or inflation, pay we will.