Never advocate any more power for your best friends than you would want to have wielded by your worst enemies.

The theologian may give lip service to the idea of God’s overlordship of the whole of life yet in practice refuse to admit the existence of an economic realm in which prevails a regularity of phenomena to which he must adjust his action. 


Man may try to deny his creaturehood in this area, and think to annul economic laws by statute. But if there are regularities here, man must reckon with them; or they will have their reckoning with him.

What Government Gives, It Must First Take Away

Now we know that this world of ours is not run along the lines of something-for- nothing; there is always a quid pro quo. If government gives you something-for-nothing or something-for-less, it is obvious that this same government is forcing some of your fellow citizens to take nothing-for-something, or less-for-something. Your gain is another’s loss; you are living at the expense of someone else. Other people are being victimized for an assumed benefit you enjoy. This is unfair; it is immoral.

The ethical code is violated whenever you pick another person’s pocket or steal his purse, and the violation is compounded when you do it legally, that is, when you allow government to do your thieving for you. But only a people with larceny in their souls will write a form of theft into their statutes. Some cynic has suggested that robbery is the first laborsaving device. He’s at least half right. And if people do covet their neighbor’s property they will surely find legal ways to get their hands on it, and conscience will bend around to approve.

An exclusive preoccupation with economizing may lead some people to neglect ethical and other considerations in their single-minded drive to have their own way, to succeed, to get more for less—more reward for less effort; maximum gain, regardless; something for nothing, whenever possible. So economic science, from the very beginning, has been joined symbiotically to a philosophy of society called Whiggism or Whiggery in the eighteenth century, later to adopt a more fitting label, liberalism. The term, Whig, derives from Whiggamore, a label contemptuously applied to some of the seventeenth-century English Dissenters and Nonconformists who led the opposition to the court party. Adam Smith was a Whig, so was Edmund Burke, and so were most of the men we speak of as Founding Fathers. The Whig Party of England became the Liberal Party in 1829.

It is impossible to fully summarize the philosophy of Ludwig von Mises in one session but we will close with what might be construed as a personal testimony by Mises himself, which does sum up the character of the man. It is a paragraph from his little book of  Bureaucracy.

“Mankind would never have reached the present state of civilization without heroism and self-sacrifice on the part of an elite. Every step forward on the way toward an improvement of moral conditions has been an achievement of men who were ready to sacrifice their own well-being, their health, and their lives for the sake of a cause that they considered just and beneficial. They did what they considered their duty without bothering whether they themselves would not be victimized. These people did not work for the sake of reward, they served their cause unto death.”

Saint Jude, sometimes known as Saint Jude Thaddeus, was one of the original apostles of Christ, a brother of Saint James the Less. He was known for preaching the gospel in particularly difficult circumstances. As such, he became the patron saint of "hopeless cases, and things almost despaired of."

In 1929, the first devotional services to St. Jude were held by Claretian Fr. James Tort at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in southeast Chicago; before the year ended, the country’s only National Shrine of St. Jude would be firmly established.

Word of the devotions to St. Jude gradually spread from that tiny corner of Chicago to other parts of the country. During the Great Depression and World War II, thousands of men, women, and children attended novenas at the Shrine; devotion to the “patron saint of hopeless causes” spread throughout the country.

Today, millions of people around the world turn to St. Jude, the Patron of Hope, for his intercession and hope as source of strength and inspiration in our faith.