The Welfare State is merely a method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism.

This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.

All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.

The recurrence of periods of depression and mass unemployment has discredited capitalism in the opinion of injudicious people. Yet these events are not the outcome of the operation of the free market. They are on the contrary the result of well-intentioned but ill-advised government interference with the market.

History has witnessed the failure of many endeavors to impose peace by war, cooperation by coercion, unanimity by slaughtering dissidents.... A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

If the present American laws concerning the taxation of the profits of corporations, the incomes of individuals, and inheritances had been introduced about 60 years ago, all those new products whose consumption has raised the standard of living of the 'common man' would either not be produced at all or only in small quantities for the benefit of a minority. The Ford enterprises would not exist if Henry Ford's profits had been taxed away as soon as they came into being.

The program of liberalism if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production.