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Our economic system—the market economy or cap­italism—is a system of consumers’ supremacy. The customer is sovereign; he is, says a popular slogan, “always right.” Businessmen are under the neces­sity of turning out what the consumers ask for and they must sell their wares at prices which the con­sumers can afford and are prepared to pay. A

When in dealing with market phenomena we apply the term “power,” we must be fully aware of the fact that we are employing it with a connotation that is entirely different from the traditional connotation attached to it in dealing with issues of government and affairs of state. Governmental  power is the faculty to beat into submission all those

[From Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis , by Ludwig von Mises, pp. 113–22.] All human action, so far as it is rational, appears as the exchange of one condition for another. Men apply economic goods and personal time and labour in the direction which, under the given circumstances, promises the highest degree of satisfaction, and

[This series of four articles is a condensation of chapters in Human Action , by Ludwig von Mises, which deal with various forms of government interference with the free market. They were published in the Wall Street Journal , December 12, 13, 14, 15, 1949, and were recently found in a folder of newspaper clippings collected by Murray Rothbard.

Profits are never normal. They appear only where there is a maladjustment, a divergence between actual production and production as it should be in order to utilize the available material and mental resources for the best possible satisfaction of the wishes of the public. They are the prize of those who remove this maladjustment; they disappear as

The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. It aims at the creation of a sphere in which the individual is free to think, to choose, and to act without being restrained by the interference of the social apparatus of coercion and oppression, the State. All the spiritual and material achievements of Western civilization

An essential element of the “unorthodox” doctrines, advanced both by all socialists and by all interventionists, is that the recurrence of depressions is a phenomenon inherent in the very operation, of the market economy. But while the socialists contend that only the substitution of socialism for capitalism can eradicate the evil, the

Liberals stressed the importance of the invidual. The nineteenth-century liberals already considered the development of the individual the most important thing. “Individual and individualism” was the progressive and liberal slogan. Reactionaries had already attacked this position at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The rationalists and

The average man lacks the imagination to realize that the conditions of life and action are in a continual flux. As he sees it, there is no change in the external objects that constitute his well-being. His world view is static and stationary. It mirrors a stagnating environment. He knows neither that the past differed from the present nor that

Lenin’s main book , or at least his most voluminous book (now available in the Collected Works of Lenin ), led some people to call him a philosopher. Most of Lenin’s critique of the ideas of his adversaries consists of calling them “bourgeois.” Lenin’s philosophy is merely a restatement of the philosophical ideas of Marx; to some extent it is not