Henry Hazlitt
Henry Hazlitt
Henry Stuart Hazlittwas an American journalist who wrote about business and economics for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The American Mercury, Newsweek, and The New York Times. He is widely cited in both libertarian and conservative circles...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth28 November 1894
CountryUnited States of America
Henry Hazlitt quotes about
benefits politician
For every alleged benefit that the politicians confer upon us, they must necessarily deprive us of something else.
thinking blue sky
Give me the clear blue sky above my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner - and then to thinking!
government political suggestions
There are millions receiving government payments who have come to consider them as an earned right, who of course find them inadequate, and who are outraged at the slightest suggestion of a critical re-examination of the subject. The political pressure for constant extension and increase of these benefits is almost irresistible.
real looks wages
Mere inflation-that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices-may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.
piano trying unemployment
To try to cure unemployment by inflation rather than by adjustment of specific wage-rates is like trying to adjust the piano to the stool rather than the stool to the piano.
men community lows
You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation.
peace men cities
There may have been somewhere, as a few eighteenth-century philosophers dreamed, a group of peaceful men who got together one evening after work and drew up a Social Contract to form the state. But nobody has been able to find an actual record of it. Practically all the governments whose origins are historically established were the result of conquest-of one tribe by another, one city by another, one people by another. Of course there have been constitutional conventions, but they merely changed the working rules of governments already in being.
world incentives way
The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. And the way to do that, as the modern world has discovered, is through the system known as capitalism - the system of private property, free markets, and free enterprise.
real balance income
The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production. Total real wealth and income is made smaller than it would otherwise be. On net balance there is more poverty rather than less.
real wages pay
Modern capitalism benefited the masses in a double way - both by greatly increasing the wages of the masses of workers and greatly reducing the real prices they had to pay for what was produced.
government giving firsts
The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn't first take from someone else.
precious-metal metals ifs
If precious metals had been abundant, they would not have been precious.
dream honesty lying
In practice [monetary management] is merely a high-sounding euphemism for continuous currency debasement. It consists of constant lying in order to support constant swindling. Instead of automatic currencies based on gold, people are forced to take managed currencies based on guile. Instead of precious metals they hold paper promises whose value falls with every bureaucratic whim. And they are suavely assured that only hopelessly antiquated minds dream of returning to truth and honesty and solvency and gold.
justice three capitalist
The superior freedom of the capitalist system, its superior justice, and its superior productivity are not three superiorities, but one. The justice follows from the freedom and the productivity follows from the freedom and the justice.