- Von Mises was the great enemy of communism, nazism, centrally
planned economies, merchantilism (today's "free trade") and central
banking.
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- "Aggressors Cannot Wage Total War Without Introducing
Totalitarian Socialism."
--Ludwig von Mises
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- If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives
them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can
be no peace.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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- Mises On War
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- War is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the
conqueror. Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of
society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.
Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession
of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys. (Socialism, p. 59)
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- The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It
bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging
commodities and services, fight one another. (1st Ed. Human Action, p.
817 ; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 821)
-
- Economically considered, war and revolution are always
bad business. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 152)
-
- The market economy means peaceful cooperation and peaceful
exchange of goods and services. It cannot persist when wholesale killing
is the order of the day. (Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, p. 67)
-
- War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake
or a plague brings. The earthquake means good business for construction
workers, and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists,
and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate
earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the
general interest. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 154)
-
- There have been...in all other nations, eulogists of
aggression, war, and conquest. (Omnipotent Government, p. 232)
-
- War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly,
since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.
(Nation, State, and Economy, p. 154)
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- [T]he essence of so-called war prosperity; it enriches
some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting
of wealth and income. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 158)
-
- War is. a destroyer and annihilator, in short, as an
evil that strikes all, victor as well as vanquished. (Nation, State, and
Economy, p. 86)
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- The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.
The wars of our age are not at variance with popular economic doctrines;
they are, on the contrary, the inescapable result of consistent application
of these doctrines. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 683; 3rd Ed. Human Action,
p. 687)
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- Whoever wishes peace among peoples must fight statism.
(Nation, State, and Economy, p. 77)
-
- Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor,
can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace. (Liberalism, p.
44)
-
- [O]nly tolerance can create and preserve the condition
of social peace without which humanity must relapse into the barbarism
and penury of centuries long past. (Liberalism, p. 56)
-
- Modern war is not a war of royal armies. It is a war
of the peoples, a total war. It is a war of states which do not leave to
their subjects any private sphere; they consider the whole population a
part of the armed forces. Whoever does not fight must work for the support
and equipment of the army. Army and people are one and the same. The citizens
passionately participate in the war. For it is their state, their God,
who fights. (Omnipotent Government, p. 104)
-
- Men are fighting one another because they are convinced
that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their
own well-being. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 175; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p.
176)
-
- The existence of the armaments industries is a consequence
of the warlike spirit, not its cause. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 297; 3rd
Ed. Human Action, p. 300)
-
- What basis for war could there still be, once all peoples
had been set free? (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 34)
-
- [V]ictorious war is an evil even for the victor, that
peace is always better than war. (Liberalism, p. 24)
-
- Wars, foreign and domestic (revolutions, civil wars),
are more likely to be avoided the closer the division of labor binds men.
(Critique of Interventionism, p. 115)
-
- War is the alternative to freedom of foreign investment
as realized by the international capital market. (1st Ed. Human Action,
p. 498; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 502)
-
- The statement that one man's boon is the other man's
damage is valid with regard to robbery, war, and booty. The robber's plunder
is the damage of the despoiled victim. But war and commerce are two different
things. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 662; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 666)
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- It is certainly true that our age is full of conflicts
which generate war. However, these conflicts do not spring from the operation
of the unhampered market society. It may be permissible to call them economic
conflicts because they concern that sphere of human life which is, in common
speech, known as the sphere of economic activities. But it is a serious
blunder to infer from this appellation that the source of these conflicts
are conditions which develop within the frame of a market society. It is
not capitalism that produces them, but precisely the anticapitalistic policies
designed to check the functioning of capitalism. They are an outgrowth
of the various governments' interference with business, of trade and migration
barriers and discrimination against foreign labor, foreign products, and
foreign capital. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 680; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p.
684)
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- What has transformed the limited war between royal armies
into total war, the clash between peoples, is not technicalities of military
art, but the substitution of the welfare state for the laissez-faire state.
(1st Ed. Human Action, p. 820; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 824 )
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- Under laissez faire peaceful coexistence of a multitude
of sovereign nations is possible. Under government control of business
it is impossible. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 820; 3rd Ed. Human Action,
p. 824)
-
- Of course, in the long run war and the preservation of
the market economy are incompatible. Capitalism is essentially a scheme
for peaceful nations. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 824; 3rd Ed. Human Action,
p. 828)
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- What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really
means is that war and high civilization are incompatible. If the efficiency
of capitalism is directed by governments toward the output of instruments
of destruction, the ingenuity of private business turns out weapons which
are powerful enough to destroy everything. What makes war and capitalism
incompatible with one another is precisely the unparalleled efficiency
of the capitalist mode of production. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 824; 3rd
Ed. Human Action, p. 828)
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- The emergence of the international division of labor
requires the total abolition of war. (1st Ed. Human Action, p. 827; 3rd
Ed. Human Action, p. 831)
-
- Modern war is merciless, it does not spare pregnant women
or infants; it is indiscriminate killing and destroying. It does not respect
the rights of neutrals. Millions are killed, enslaved, or expelled from
the dwelling places in which their ancestors lived for centuries. Nobody
can foretell what will happen in the next chapter of this endless struggle.
This has little to do with the atomic bomb. The root of the evil is not
the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.
It is probable that scientists will discover some methods of defense against
the atomic bomb. But this will not alter things, it will merely prolong
for a short time the process of the complete destruction of civilization.
(1st Ed. Human Action, p. 828; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 832)
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- To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace
durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.
(1st Ed. Human Action, p. 828; 3rd Ed. Human Action, p. 832)
-
- The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes
peace, (Socialism, p. 62)
-
- Social development is always a collaboration for joint
action; the social relationship always means peace, never war. Death-dealing
actions and war are anti-social. All those theories which regard human
progress as an outcome of conflicts between human groups have overlooked
this truth. (Socialism, p. 279)
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- Within a world of free trade and democracy there are
no incentives for war and conquest. (Omnipotent Government, p. 3)
-
- But what is needed for a satisfactory solution of the
burning problem of international relations is neither a new office with
more committees, secretaries, commissioners, reports, and regulations,
nor a new body of armed executioners, but the radical overthrow of mentalities
and domestic policies which must result in conflict. (Omnipotent Government,
p. 6)
-
- If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives
them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can
be no peace. (Omnipotent Government, p. 15)
-
- For only in peace can the economic system achieve its
ends, the fullest satisfaction of human needs and wants. (Omnipotent Government,
p. 50)
-
- It is not a shortcoming of the liberal program for international
peace that it cannot be realized within an antiliberal world and that it
must fail in an age of interventionism and socialism. (Omnipotent Government,
p. 91)
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- Wars of aggression are popular nowadays with those nations
which are convinced that only victory and conquest could improve their
material well-being. (Omnipotent Government, p. 104)
-
- The old liberals were right in asserting that no citizen
of a liberal and democratic nation profits from a victorious war. (Omnipotent
Government, p. 104)
-
- Social cooperation and war are in the long run incompatible.
But within the social system of cooperation and division of labor war means
disintegration. The progressive evolution of society requires the progressive
elimination of war. Under present conditions of international division
of labor there is no room left for wars. The great society of world-embracing
mutual exchange of commodities and services demands a peaceful coexistence
of states and nations. (Omnipotent Government, p. 122)
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- If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization
and mankind are doomed. (Omnipotent Government, p. 122)
-
- If you want to abolish war, you must eliminate its causes.
What is needed is to restrict government activities to the preservation
of life, health, and private property, and thereby to safeguard the working
of the market. Sovereignty must not be used for inflicting harm on anyone,
whether citizen or foreigner. (Omnipotent Government, p. 138)
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- The market economy involves peaceful cooperation and
bursts asunder when people, instead of exchanging commodities and services,
are fighting one another. (The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science
p. 92)
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- Only one thing can conquer war--that liberal attitude
of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation,
and which can never wish to bring about a war, because it regards war as
injurious even to the victors. (Theory of Money and Credit, p. 433)
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- Where liberalism prevails, there will never be war. (The
Theory of Money and Credit, p. 433)
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- If war is regarded as advantageous, then laws . . . will
not be allowed to stand in the way of going to war. On the first day of
any war, all the laws opposing obstacles to it will be swept aside. (The
Theory of Money and Credit, p. 434)
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- The first condition for the establishment of perpetual
peace is, of course, the general adoption of the principles of laissez-faire
capitalism. (The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science p. 137)
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- He who wants to prepare a lasting peace must.be a free-trader
and a democrat and work with decisiveness for the removal of all political
rule over colonies by a mother country and fight for the full freedom of
movements of persons and goods. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 86)
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- If one wants to make peace, then one must get rid of
the possibility of conflicts between peoples. (Nation, State, and Economy,
p. 86)
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- If one holds the view that there are irreconcilable class
antagonisms between the individual strata of society that cannot be resolved
except by the forcible victory of one class over others, if one believes
that no contacts between individual nations are possible except those whereby
one wins what the other loses, then, of course, one must admit that revolutions
at home and wars abroad cannot be avoided. (Nation, State, and Economy,
p. 87)
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- Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit
the state and its influence most strictly. (Nation, State, and Economy,
p. 94)
-
- The way to eternal peace does not lead through strengthening
state and central power, as socialism strives for. (Nation, State, and
Economy, p. 96)
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- [W]ith the progress of the division of labor we see the
number of wars and battles diminishing ever more and more. The spirit of
industrialism, which is indefatigably active in the development of trade
relations, undermines the warlike spirit. (Nation, State, and Economy,
p. 150)
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- Liberalism rejects aggressive war not on philanthropic
grounds but from the standpoint of utility. It rejects aggressive war because
it regards victory as harmful, and it wants no conquests because it sees
them as an unsuitable means for reaching the ultimate goals for which it
strives. Not through war and victory but only through work can a nation
create the preconditions for the well-being of its members. Conquering
nations finally perish, either because they are annihilated by strong ones
or because the ruling class is culturally overwhelmed by the subjugated.
(Nation, State, and Economy, p. 87)
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- 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. (Omnipotent
Government, p. 7)
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- Whoever on ethical grounds wants to maintain war permanently
for its own sake as a feature of relations among peoples must clearly realize
that this can happen only at the cost of the general welfare, since the
economic development of the world would have to be turned back at least
to the state of the year 1830 to realize this martial ideal even only to
some extent. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 151)
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- The losses that the national economy suffers from war,
apart from the disadvantages that exclusion from world trade entails, consist
of the destruction of goods by military actions, of the consumption of
war material of all kinds, and of the loss of productive labor that the
persons drawn into military service would have rendered in their civilian
activities. Further losses from loss of labor occur insofar as the number
of workers is lastingly reduced by the number of the fallen and as the
survivors become less fit in consequence of injuries suffered, hardships
undergone, illnesses suffered, and worsened nutrition. (Nation, State,
and Economy, p. 151-52)
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- There are circumstances which make the consumption of
capital unavoidable. A costly war cannot be financed without such a damaging
measure..There may arise situations in which it may be unavoidable to burn
down the house to keep from freezing, but those who do that should realize
what it costs and what they will have to do without later on. (Interventionism:
an Economic Analysis, p. 52)
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- It is not the war profits of the entrepreneurs that are
objectionable. War itself is objectionable! (Interventionism: an Economic
Analysis, p. 74)
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- >From the beginning the intention prevailed in all
socialist groups of dropping none of the measures adopted during the war
after the war but rather of advancing on the way toward the completion
of socialism. (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 176)
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- [A]ggressors cannot wage total war without introducing
socialism. (Interventionism: an Economic Analysis, p. 70)
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- The great British economist Edwin Cannan (1861-1935)
wrote that if anyone had the impertinence to ask him what he did in the
Great War, he would answer, "I protested." (Economic Freedom
and Interventionism, p. 172.)
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