George Reisman

In a free market, the prices of products tend to be governed by their costs of production.

In a free market, within the limit of his abilities, each person chooses that job which he believes offers him the best combination of money and nonmonetary considerations. In so doing, he simultaneously acts for his own maximum well-being and for that of the consumers who buy the ultimate products his labor helps to produce.

Speculative activity, of course, is not limited to anticipating just future scarcities. Rather, it seeks in general to balance consumption and production over time by accumulating stocks of commodities and regulating their rate of consumption.

Ludwig Von Mises is important because his teachings are necessary to the preservation of capitalism and thus of civilization.

The uniformity-of-profit principle describes a tendency, never an actually existing state of affairs.

Farm subsidies are a way the government achieves artificially high prices. They are an illustration of legal minimum prices—that is, prices below which the government prevents the producers from selling.

The operation of the tendency toward a uniform rate of profit requires that high profits be made by continuously introducing productive innovations in advance of competitors.

How the profit motive acts to make production steadily increase in a free market, and becomes an agent of continuous economic progress.

The real advocates of the consumers—their virtual agents—are businessmen seeking profit, not the leaders of groups trying to restrict the freedom of businessmen to earn profits.

In total opposition to the misguided efforts of the Marxists to contrast production for profit with “production for use,” the fact is that production for profit is production for use.

The uniformity-of-profit principle explains how the activities of all the separate business enterprises are harmoniously coordinated so that capital is not invested excessively in the production of some items while leaving the production of other items unprovided for.

The best way to begin to understand the functioning of the price system, and thus the full nature of the dependence of the division of labor on capitalism, is by understanding the following very simple and fundamental principle. Namely, there is a tendency in a free market toward the establishment of a uniform rate of profit on capital invested in all the different branches of industry.

Economics proves the existence of a harmony of the rational self-interests of all participants in the economic system—a harmony which permeates the institutions of private ownership of the means of production, economic inequality, and economic competition.