Almost all the fathers of socialism were members of the upper middle class or of the professions.

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.

Governments, political parties, pressure groups, and the bureaucrats of the educational hierarchy think they can avoid the inevitable consequences of unsuitable measures by boycotting and silencing the independent economists. But truth persists and works, even if nobody is left to utter it.

Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

Inflation is the true opium of the people and it is administered to them by anticapitalist governments and parties.

Within the market society each serves all his fellow citizens and each is served by them. It is a system of mutual exchange of services and commodities, a mutual giving, and receiving.

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.