Politics & Power Quote by Ludwig von Mises

Mises pins a disturbingly modern logic to the wall: aggression doesn’t sell itself as bloodlust; it sells itself as a business plan. The sentence is built like an indictment, but it’s also an anatomy lesson in how nations talk themselves into theft at scale. “Popular nowadays” is the tell. He’s not describing a rare pathology; he’s diagnosing a fashionable mood, a crowd instinct dressed up as policy. The phrase shrugs at moral outrage and instead spotlights the more corrosive driver: mass consent.

The subtext is classic Mises: war isn’t an accident of “ancient hatreds” or purely a clash of ideals. It’s political economy with uniforms. When a society believes prosperity is zero-sum, conquest becomes a shortcut and neighbors become inventory. “Material well-being” is doing double duty here. It’s an honest admission of motive (resources, markets, territory), and a warning about how easily comfort becomes a moral solvent. People will tolerate atrocities if they’ve been told the ledger will balance in their favor.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of the world wars and the rise of economic nationalism, Mises is pushing back on the romanticization of conflict and the idea that state power can engineer abundance through expansion. He’s also quietly rebuking intellectuals and policymakers who launder aggression with euphemisms: security, destiny, national rejuvenation. The line works because it refuses the euphemisms and names the transactional core: conquest marketed as improvement, violence repackaged as uplift.