Politics & Power Quote by Ludwig von Mises

Mises is doing something more provocative than praising small government: he is reframing peace as an institutional design problem, not a moral aspiration. The sentence is built like a moral imperative, but its real target is the modern state’s expanding toolkit - taxation, conscription, propaganda, central planning - the machinery that makes large-scale conflict feasible and even administratively “efficient.” Peace, in his view, isn’t secured by better leaders or sturdier treaties; it’s secured by reducing the capacity to mobilize society for war.

The subtext is classic Austrian economics: when the state grows, it doesn’t just regulate markets, it concentrates decision-making and turns political control into the highest-stakes prize. That prize invites coercion at home and adventurism abroad. Limit the state “most strictly” and you lower the payoff to conquest, shrink the resources available for militarism, and reduce the nationalist zero-sum competition that centralized power tends to inflame.

Context matters. Mises lived through the unraveling of the Habsburg order, the First World War, and the rise of totalitarian regimes that married economic control to mass violence. For him, “among nations” isn’t abstract diplomacy; it’s a Europe where borders hardened, minorities became liabilities, and economic autarky fed paranoia. The line also smuggles in a defense of liberal capitalism as a peace project: trade, private property, and decentralized exchange create cross-border interdependence that makes war costlier and less narratively satisfying.

It’s a clean, austere claim with an edge: if you want peace, stop building institutions that can so easily wage war.