… is from page 49 of the 2006 Liberty Fund edition of Ludwig von Mises’s 1956 volume, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality:
Men, cooperating under the system of the division of labor, have created all the wealth which the daydreamers consider as a free gift of nature. With regard to the “distribution” of this wealth, it is nonsensical to refer to an allegedly divine or natural principle of justice. What matters is not the allocation of portions out of a fund presented to man by nature. The problem is rather to further those social institutions which enable people to continue and to enlarge the production of all those things which they need.
