Quotes from book
Bureaucracy

Name: Bureaucracy
Author: Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises

Bureaucracy is a political book written by Austrian School economist and libertarian thinker Ludwig von Mises. The author's motivation in writing the book is his concern with the spread of socialist ideals and the increasing bureaucratization of economic life. While he does not deny the necessity of certain bureaucratic structures for the smooth operation of any civilized state, he disagrees with the extent to which it has come to dominate the public life of European countries and the United States. The author's purpose is to demonstrate that the negative aspects of bureaucracy are not a result of bad policies or corruption, as the public tends to think. Instead, he explains, those problems are necessarily built into bureaucratic structures. They are due to the very tasks such a system has to deal with. The main body of the book is therefore devoted to a comparison between private enterprise on the one hand and bureaucratic agencies/public enterprise on the other.

“The capitalist system of production is an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote.”

Ludwig von Mises book Bureaucracy

The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people’s mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what the consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.
Source: Bureaucracy (1944), Chapter I: Profit Management, § 1: The Operation of The Market Mechanism