Top 100 Henry Hazlitt Quotes
#1. New taxes are so unpopular that most 'social' handout schemes are originally enacted without enough increased taxation to pay for them. The result is chronic government deficits, paid for by the issuance of additional paper money.
Henry Hazlitt
#2. If we try to run the economy for the benefit of a single group or class, we shall injure or destroy all groups, including the members of the very class for whose benefit we have been trying to run it. We must run the economy for everybody
Henry Hazlitt
#3. The idea that an expanding economy implies that all industries must be simultaneously expanding is a profound error.
Henry Hazlitt
#4. Another way to find whether an analogy is fallacious is to see whether you can discover a counter analogy. Surely this is the most effective practice in refuting analogy in argument.
Henry Hazlitt
#5. The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. The world must be saved from its saviors. If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!
Henry Hazlitt
#6. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
Henry Hazlitt
#7. The monetary managers are fond of telling us that they have substituted 'responsible money management' for the gold standard. But there is no historic record of responsible paper money management ... The record taken, as a whole is one of hyperinflation, devaluation and monetary chaos.
Henry Hazlitt
#8. The only way government bureaucrats know of keeping prosperity going is to inflate some more - to increase the deficit or to pump more money into the system.
Henry Hazlitt
#9. Prolonged inflation never 'stimulates' the economy. On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.
Henry Hazlitt
#10. One of the worst features of all the plans for sharing wealth and equalizing or guaranteeing incomes is that they lose sight of the conditions and institution s that are necessary to create wealth and income in the first place.
Henry Hazlitt
#11. From a strictly economic point of view, buying gold in a major inflation and holding it probably presents the least risk of capital loss of any investment or speculation.
Henry Hazlitt
#12. Each of us must also sell something, even if for most of us it is our own services rather than goods, in order to get the purchasing power to buy.
Henry Hazlitt
#13. We can clarify our thinking if we put our chief emphasis where it belongs - on policies that will maximize production.
Henry Hazlitt
#14. 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.
Henry Hazlitt
#15. Socialists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized destitution were preferable to "maldistributed" plenty. A national income that is rapidly growing in absolute terms for practically everyone will be deplored because it is making the rich richer.
Henry Hazlitt
#16. If we look at it now from the consumer's point of view, we find that he can buy less with his money. Because he has to pay more for sweaters and other protected goods, he can buy less of everything else. The general purchasing power of his income has therefore been reduced.
Henry Hazlitt
#17. Bureaucrats denounce private enterprise for the consequences of their own reckless policies and demand still more governmental controls.
Henry Hazlitt
#18. In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.
Henry Hazlitt
#19. They tell us how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace.
Henry Hazlitt
#20. A man will put forth greater efforts to save himself from ruin than he will merely to improve his position.
Henry Hazlitt
#21. The more 'adequate' we make relief, the more people we are going to find willing to get on it and stay on it indefinitely. The more we try to make sure that everybody really in need of relief gets it, the more certain we can be that we are also giving it to people who neither need nor deserve it.
Henry Hazlitt
#22. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.'
Henry Hazlitt
#23. Once the idea is accepted that money is something whose supply is determined simply by the printing press, it becomes impossible for the politicians in power to resist the constant demands for further inflation.
Henry Hazlitt
#24. For every dollar that is spent on the (boondoggle) bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000, 000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most.
Henry Hazlitt
#25. The same reasoning applies to civilian government officials whenever they are retained in excessive numbers and do not perform services for the community reasonably equivalent to the remuneration they receive.
Henry Hazlitt
#26. Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing army of pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a halt - and quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become.
Henry Hazlitt
#27. The function of profits, finally, is to put constant and unremitting pressure on the head of every competitive business to introduce further economies and efficiencies, no matter to what stage these may already have been brought.
Henry Hazlitt
#28. What is really being lent is not money, which is merely the medium of exchange, but capital.
Henry Hazlitt
#29. In all experiments one must exercise ingenuity in finding other causes besides the one to be studied which may possibly influence a result, and in eliminating these.
Henry Hazlitt
#30. Eternal vigilance is the price of an open mind.
Henry Hazlitt
#31. It is as foolish to try to preserve obsolescent industries as to try to preserve obsolescent methods of production: this is often, in fact, merely two ways of describing the same thing.
Henry Hazlitt
#32. If precious metals had been abundant, they would not have been precious.
Henry Hazlitt
#33. There is no more certain way to deter employment than to harass and penalize employers. There is no more certain way to keep wages low than to destroy every incentive to investment in new and more efficient machines and equipment.
Henry Hazlitt
#34. The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.
Henry Hazlitt
#35. Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty.
Henry Hazlitt
#37. The more things a government undertakes to do, the fewer things it can do completely. When the government tries to do everything it must do everything badly.
Henry Hazlitt
#38. The long-run historical tendency of capitalism has not only been to increase real incomes more or less proportionately nearly all along the line, but to benefit the masses even more than the rich.
Henry Hazlitt
#39. 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.
Henry Hazlitt
#40. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936, 1969)
Henry Hazlitt
#41. The real solution to the problem of poverty consists in finding how to increase the employment and earning power of the poor.
Henry Hazlitt
#42. Ither immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light.
Henry Hazlitt
#43. A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.
Henry Hazlitt
#44. Inflation makes the extension of socialism possible by providing the financial chaos in which it flourishes. The fact is that socialism and inflation are cause and effect, they feed on each other!
Henry Hazlitt
#45. Private loans will utilize existing resources and capital far better than government loans. Government loans will waste far more capital and resources than private loans. Government loans, in short, as compared with private loans, will reduce production, not increase it.
Henry Hazlitt
#46. If a government resorts to inflation, that is, creates money in order to cover its budget deficits or expands credit in order to stimulate business, then no power on earth, no gimmick, device, trick or even indexation can prevent its economic consequences.
Henry Hazlitt
#47. When providing employment becomes the end, need becomes a subordinate consideration.
Henry Hazlitt
#48. Would-be income guarantors ignore or despise the capitalistic system that makes their dreams dreamable and gives their redistribute-the-income proposals whatever plausibility they have.
Henry Hazlitt
#49. For as Alexander Hamilton pointed out in the Federalist Papers nearly two centuries ago, A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will.
Henry Hazlitt
#50. A vital function of the free market is to penalize inefficiency and misjudgment and to reward efficiency and good judgment. By distorting economic calculations and creating illusory profits, inflation will destroy this function.
Henry Hazlitt
#51. The larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment. When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble.
Henry Hazlitt
#52. Rent control, however, encourages wasteful use of space.
Henry Hazlitt
#53. The way to get a maximum rate of 'economic growth' assuming this to be our aim - is to give maximum encouragement to production, employment, saving, and investment. And the way to do this is to maintain a free market and a sound currency.
Henry Hazlitt
#54. When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists.
Henry Hazlitt
#55. The larger part of the 50,000 English stocking knitters and their families did not fully emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the machine for the next forty years.
Henry Hazlitt
#56. Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself
Henry Hazlitt
#57. The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise, the restoration of incentives, to let loose the tremendous constructive energies of 300 million Americans.
Henry Hazlitt
#58. the real causes of any existing depression. For the real causes, most of the time, are maladjustments within the wage-cost-price structure: maladjustments between wages and prices, between prices of raw materials and prices of finished goods, or between one price and another or one wage and another.
Henry Hazlitt
#59. Just as there is no technical improvement that would not hurt someone, so there is no change in public taste or morals, even for the better, that would not hurt someone.
Henry Hazlitt
#60. The essential function of the State is to maintain peace, justice, law, and order, and to protect the individual citizen against aggression, violence, theft, and fraud.
Henry Hazlitt
#61. The great merit of gold is precisely that it is scarce; that its quantity is limited by nature; that it is costly to discover, to mine, and to process; and that it cannot be created by political fiat or caprice.
Henry Hazlitt
#62. Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.
Henry Hazlitt
#63. Short-sighted and impatient efforts to wipe out poverty by severing the connection between effort and reward can only lead to the growth of a totalitarian state, and destroy the economic progress that this country has so dearly bought.
Henry Hazlitt
#64. The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.
Henry Hazlitt
#65. When any welfare scheme is being proposed, its political sponsors always dwell on what a generous and compassionate government should pay to Paul; they neglect to mention that this additional money must be seized from Peter.
Henry Hazlitt
#66. Diluting the money supply with paper is the moral equivalent of diluting the milk supply with water.
Henry Hazlitt
#67. More and more people are becoming aware that government has nothing to give them without first taking it away from somebody else-or from themselves. Increased handouts to selected groups mean merely increased taxes, or increased deficits and increased inflation.
Henry Hazlitt
#68. Many of the most frequent fallacies in economic reasoning come from the propensity, especially marked today, to think in terms of an abstraction - the collectivity, the "nation" - and to forget or ignore the individuals who make it up and give it meaning.
Henry Hazlitt
#69. Theory is the best guide for experiment - that were it not for theory and the problems and hypotheses that come out of it, we would not know the points we wanted to verify, and hence would experiment aimlessly
Henry Hazlitt
#70. The sad fact is that today most of the heads of big businesses in America have become so confused or intimidated that, so far from carrying the free market to argument to the enemy, they fail to defend themselves adequately even when attacked.
Henry Hazlitt
#71. The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.
Henry Hazlitt
#72. It is best to avoid analogy except for purposes of suggestion, or as a rhetorical device for explaining an idea already arrived at by other means.
Henry Hazlitt
#73. A Day never passes without some ardent reformer or group of reformers suggesting some new government intervention, some new statist scheme to fill some alleged 'need' or relieve some alleged distress.
Henry Hazlitt
#74. For every alleged benefit that the politicians confer upon us, they must necessarily deprive us of something else.
Henry Hazlitt
#75. demand and supply are merely two sides of the same coin. They are the same thing looked at from different directions. Supply creates demand because at bottom it is demand. The supply of the thing they make is all that people have, in fact, to offer in exchange for the things they want.
Henry Hazlitt
#76. The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge. In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: 'Yes, madam, everything's going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you'll carry coal.'
Henry Hazlitt
#77. There is no limit to the amount of work to be done as long as any human need or wish that work could fill remains unsatisfied.
Henry Hazlitt
#78. Functional prices are those that encourage the largest volume of production and the largest volume of sales. Functional wages are those that tend to bring about the highest volume of employment and the largest real payrolls.
Henry Hazlitt
#79. It is possible to increase paper-money income to any amount by debasing the currency. But real income can only be increased by working harder or more efficiently, saving more, investing more, and producing more.
Henry Hazlitt
#80. What is put into the hands of B cannot be put into the hands of A.
Henry Hazlitt
#81. Half the thinking process, as pointed out, depends on the occurrence of suggestions. The occurrence of suggestions depends on how ideas are associated in a man's mind.This depends to some extent on the education and the whole past life and environment of the individual
Henry Hazlitt
#82. The quickest way to detect error in analogy is to carry it out as far as it will go - and further. Every analogy will break down somewhere. Any analogy if carried out far enough becomes absurd.
Henry Hazlitt
#83. What a commodity has cost to produce in the past cannot determine its value. That will depend on the present relationship of supply and demand.
Henry Hazlitt
#84. When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.
Henry Hazlitt
#85. Government planning always involves compulsion.
Henry Hazlitt
#86. The future of human liberty ... means the future of civilization.
Henry Hazlitt
#87. Relief, or redistribution of income, voluntary or coerced, is never the true solution of poverty, but at best a makeshift, which may mask the disease and mitigate the pain, but provides no basic cure.
Henry Hazlitt
#88. If you follow this method with all problems - i.e., thinking a thing out for yourself before looking up what others have thought - you will soon improve your thinking surprisingly.
Henry Hazlitt
#89. Full employment - very full employment; long, weary, back-breaking employment - is characteristic of precisely the nations that are most retarded industrially.
Henry Hazlitt
#90. Inflation is a form of tax, a tax that we all collectively must pay.
Henry Hazlitt
#91. When each of us is free to work out his own economic destiny, within the framework of the market economy, the institution of private property, and the general rule of law, we will all improve our economic condition much faster than when we are ordered around by bureaucrats.
Henry Hazlitt
#92. Libertarians are learning to their sorrow that big businessmen cannot necessarily be relied upon to be their allies in the battle against extension of governmental encroachments.
Henry Hazlitt
#93. Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment.
Henry Hazlitt
#94. The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been to increase at an exponential rate.
Henry Hazlitt
#95. The army of relief and other subsidy recipients will continue to grow, and the solvency of the government will become increasingly un tenable, as long as part of the population can vote to force the other part to support it.
Henry Hazlitt
#96. There is a profound contrast between the effects of foreign aid and of voluntary private investment: foreign aid goes from government to government. It is therefore almost inevitably statist and socialistic.
Henry Hazlitt
#97. Much of the success of our thinking will depend upon just how we divide our big problems into subsidiary problems, and just what our subsidiary or subordinate problems are.
Henry Hazlitt
#98. A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.
Henry Hazlitt
#99. Unions, though they may for a time be able to secure an increase in money wages for their members, partly at the expense of employers and more at the expense of nonunionized workers, cannot, in the long-run and for the whole body of workers, increase real wages at all.
Henry Hazlitt
#100. Taxation for public housing destroys as many jobs in other lines as it creates in housing.
Henry Hazlitt
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