Time & Perspective Quote by Ludwig von Mises

Mises drops this line like a cold glass of water on the comforting story that government is society’s grown-up in the room. The phrasing is doing a lot of work. “Can be” nods to the obvious counterexample - states sometimes build roads, enforce contracts, stop violence - but “has often been” turns the nod into an indictment. He’s not arguing about a rare malfunction; he’s arguing about a recurring pattern. “Main source” is the provocation: not merely a contributor to tragedy, but the central machine that scales it.

The subtext is classic Mises: coercion is the state’s comparative advantage. Markets coordinate through voluntary exchange and dispersed knowledge; states coordinate through commands backed by force. That means when the state gets big things wrong, it doesn’t fail quietly. It drafts, confiscates, censors, and wages war with a legitimacy no private actor can counterfeit. “Mischief and disaster” is a deliberately broad pairing - mischief for the daily humiliations of bureaucracy and petty authoritarianism, disaster for the historic catastrophes: war, inflationary collapse, expropriation, famine after central planning.

Context matters. Mises lived through the implosion of empires, World War I, the rise of fascism and communism, and the intellectual fashion for “scientific” planning. He watched politics promise rational control over society and deliver mass mobilization instead. The line is designed to puncture the progressive assumption that more state capacity automatically means more social good. It’s also a warning to economists: treat power as an economic variable, not a benevolent referee.