"The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments"
About this Quote
Mises is doing something deliberately bracing here: he refuses to let “evil” remain a misty moral category and pins it to an institution with a mailing address. Not famine, not plague, not “human nature” in the abstract - government. The line is calibrated for polemic, but it’s also a strategic reframe. If the worst harms are political, then economics isn’t just about efficiency; it’s a frontline defense against coercion.
The specific intent is to make the state the primary suspect in history’s atrocities. It’s a thesis compressed into a sentence: concentrated power doesn’t merely fail; it actively manufactures suffering at scale. “Inflicted” is the key verb. Evils happen; governments do them. And “bad governments” is doing double duty: it sounds like a modest qualifier while quietly implying that the mechanism of government makes “bad” not an exception but a recurring outcome whenever power expands faster than constraints.
Context matters. Mises lived through the collapse of empires, World War I, the rise of fascism and communism, and the bureaucratic machinery that made mass dispossession and murder administratively possible. For an Austrian School economist, these weren’t random horrors; they were the predictable endpoint of planning, propaganda, and emergency rule.
The subtext is a warning shot at the perennial temptation to solve social problems by centralizing authority. It’s also an invitation to distrust “good intentions” when they come with agencies, decrees, and prisons attached. Mises isn’t saying markets are pure; he’s saying governments can turn ordinary human vices into industrial policy.
The specific intent is to make the state the primary suspect in history’s atrocities. It’s a thesis compressed into a sentence: concentrated power doesn’t merely fail; it actively manufactures suffering at scale. “Inflicted” is the key verb. Evils happen; governments do them. And “bad governments” is doing double duty: it sounds like a modest qualifier while quietly implying that the mechanism of government makes “bad” not an exception but a recurring outcome whenever power expands faster than constraints.
Context matters. Mises lived through the collapse of empires, World War I, the rise of fascism and communism, and the bureaucratic machinery that made mass dispossession and murder administratively possible. For an Austrian School economist, these weren’t random horrors; they were the predictable endpoint of planning, propaganda, and emergency rule.
The subtext is a warning shot at the perennial temptation to solve social problems by centralizing authority. It’s also an invitation to distrust “good intentions” when they come with agencies, decrees, and prisons attached. Mises isn’t saying markets are pure; he’s saying governments can turn ordinary human vices into industrial policy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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