Random acts of Austrianism

During the YAF national conference this past week, I spoke to a young man who'd read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom but who hadn't read Mises' Socialism, and so I recommended that he amend the omission.

When I came home from the conference, I discovered that (surprise!) my wife had rearranged my office, and it happened that, in the process, my copy of Socialism was placed atop my desk. Any book worth reading is worth re-reading, so even though I've read through Socialism at least three times, today I began to browsing it at leisure, and just now happened on this timely passage:

The theory of increasing poverty among the masses stands at the centre of Marxist thought as well as of older socialist doctrines. The accumulation of poverty parallels the accumulation of capital. . . .
The fact is, that the doctrine of increasing relative social poverty is nothing more than an attempt to give an economic justification to policies based on the resentment of the masses. Growing social poverty means merely growing envy.

Beautiful.