Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 29 of Ludwig von Mises’s 1952 lecture “Capital Supply and American Prosperity” as reprinted in the 2008 Liberty Fund edition of Mises’s 1952 collection, Planning for Freedom:

What begot modern industrialization and the unprecedented improvement in material conditions that it brought about was neither capital previously accumulated nor previously assembled technological knowledge. In England, as well as in the other Western countries that followed it on the path of capitalism, the early pioneers of capitalism started with scanty capital and scanty technological experience. At the outset of industrialization was the philosophy of private enterprise and initiative, and the practical application of this ideology made the capital swell and the technological know-how advance and ripen.