Daily Inspiration Quote by Ludwig von Mises

For an economist as allergic to romantic nationalism as Ludwig von Mises, “War... is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror” is a cold splash of accounting reality on a culture that likes its violence wrapped in glory. The ellipsis matters: it mimics the pause before an unpleasant line item gets read aloud. Mises isn’t bargaining with your morality; he’s challenging your self-interest.

The specific intent is to puncture the conqueror’s favorite story: that war is a profitable shortcut to security, resources, or prestige. Mises, steeped in liberal economics, treats societies as intricate systems of cooperation. War doesn’t just destroy buildings and bodies; it shreds the institutional scaffolding that makes prosperity possible: trade networks, capital accumulation, predictable law, and the trust that lets strangers transact. A conquering state may seize assets, but it also inherits the costs of occupation, repression, and administrative sprawl, while normalizing coercion at home. The “victor” pays in debt, inflation, militarized politics, and a citizenry trained to accept command over consent.

The subtext is a rebuke to the seductive arithmetic of empire. Even if conquest “works” in the narrow sense of extraction, it corrodes the very liberal order that makes wealth durable. Coming from a man who lived through the collapse of empires, the hyperinflation of interwar Europe, and the rise of totalitarian regimes, this is less pacifist sentiment than diagnosis: war is a negative-sum transaction that tempts states into mistaking plunder for production and power for prosperity.