Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 268 of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition of the 1936 J. Kahane translation of Ludwig von Mises’s great 1922 volume, Socialism:

Progress in the division of labour depends entirely on a realization of its advantages, that is, of its higher productivity. The truth of this first became fully evident through the free-trade doctrines of the physiocrats and the classical eighteenth-century political economy. But in rudiments it is found in all arguments favouring peace, wherever peace is praised, or war condemned. History is a struggle between two principles, the peaceful principle, which advances the development of trade, and the militarist-imperialist principle, which interprets human society not as a friendly division of labour but as the forcible repression of some of its members by others.