Liberty and Property

Benjamin Martin: May I sit with you?
Charlotte Selton: It's a free country. Or at least it will be.
--The Patriot

Wonderful Mises essay originally given as a speech at Princeton University in 1958. Essentially, Mises reviews economic system progression toward capitalism and associated political progress toward liberty.

So many compact insights. Just a few here that stuck out to me:

"[The Industrial Revolution's] main achievement was the transfer of economic supremecy from the owners of land to the totality of the population." (19)

"There is under capitalism one way to wealth: to serve the consumers better and cheaper than other people do." (20)

"Representative government by the people is an attempt to arrange constitutional affairs according to the model of the market." (21)

"Socialism substitutes the sovereignty of a dictator, or committee of dictators, for the sovereignty of the consumers." (25)

"Society is essentially the mutual exchange of services." (34)

"Government is essentially the negation of liberty." (34)

"Capitalistic business is not the perserverance in the once attained state of production. It is rather ceaseless innovation, daily repeated attempts to improve the provision of the consumers by new, better and cheaper products." (42)

"[Private property] is the means to stimulate a nation's most enterprising men to exert themselves to the best of their abilities in the service of all people." (44)

"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." (48)