Ludwig von Mises

All varieties of the producers’ policy are advocated on the ground of their alleged ability to raise the party members’ standard of living. Protectionism and economic self-sufficiency, labor union pressure and compulsion, labor legislation, minimum wage rates, public spending, credit expansion, subsidies, and other makeshifts are always recommended by their advocates as the most suitable or the only means to increase the real income of the people for whose votes they canvass. Every contemporary statesman or politician invariably tells his voters: My program will make you as affluent as conditions may permit, while my adversaries’ program will bring you want and misery.

All varieties of the producers’ policy are advocated on the ground of their alleged ability to raise the party members’ standard of living. Protectionism and economic self-sufficiency, labor union pressure and compulsion, labor legislation, minimum wage rates, public spending, credit expansion, subsidies, and other makeshifts are always recommended by their advocates as the most suitable or the only means to increase the real income of the people for whose votes they canvass. Every contemporary statesman or politician invariably tells his voters: My program will make you as affluent as conditions may permit, while my adversaries’ program will bring you want and misery.

– Ludwig von Mises –

Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

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Ludwig von Mises

These people look upon inequality as upon an evil. They do not assert that a definitedegree of inequality which can be exactly determined by a judgment free of anyarbitrariness and personal evaluation is good and has to be preserved unconditionally.They, on the contrary, declare inequality in itself as bad and merely contend that alower degree of it is a lesser evil than a higher degree in the same sense in which asmaller quantity of poison in a man’s body is a lesser evil than a larger dose. But ifthis is so, then there is logically in their doctrine no point at which the endeavorstoward equalization would have to stop. Whether one has already reached a degree ofinequality which is to be considered low enough and beyond which it is not necessaryto embark upon further measures toward equalization is just a matter of personaljudgments of value, quite arbitrary, different with different people and changing in thepassing of time. As these champions of equalization appraise confiscation and“redistribution” as a policy harming only a minority, viz., those whom they considerto be “too” rich, and benefiting the rest—the majority—of the people, they cannotoppose any tenable argument to those who are asking for more of this allegedlybeneficial policy. As long as any degree of inequality is left, there will always bepeople whom envy impels to press for a continuation of the equalization policy.Nothing can be advanced against their inference: If inequality of wealth and incomesis an evil, there is no reason to acquiesce in any degree of it, however low;equalization must not stop before it has completely leveled all individuals’ wealth andincomes.

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