Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government (1944)

[Georges Kaplan]

"European governments and parliaments have been eager for more than sixty years to hamper the operation of the market, to interfere with business, and to cripple capitalism. They have blithely ignored the warnings of economists. They have erected trade barriers, they have fostered credit expansion and an easy money policy, they have taken recourse to price control, to minimum wage rates, and to subsidies. They have transformed taxation into confiscation and expropriation; they have proclaimed heedless spending as the best method to increase wealth and welfare. But when the inevitable consequences of such policies, long before predicted by the economists, became more and more obvious, public opinion did not place the blame on these cherished policies, it indicted capitalism. In the eyes of the public not anticapitalistic policies but capitalism is the root cause of economic depression, of unemployment, of inflation and rising prices, of monopoly and of waste, of social unrest and of war."

-- Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government, the rise of the total state & total war (1944)

Un chef d'oeuvre de Mises sur l'avènement du national-socialisme en Allemagne… et d'une effrayante actualité à bien des égards.

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