Our whole civilization rests on the fact that men have always succeeded in beating off the attack of the re-distributors.

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.

For it is an essential difference between capitalist and socialist production that under capitalism men provide for themselves, while under Socialism they are provided for.

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends.

Government is essentially the negation of liberty.

Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that.