Top 100 Henry Hazlitt Quotes
#1. The real solution to the problem of poverty consists in finding how to increase the employment and earning power of the poor.
Henry Hazlitt
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. When providing employment becomes the end, need becomes a subordinate consideration.
Henry Hazlitt
#7. all government expenditures must eventually be paid out of the proceeds of taxation; that inflation itself is merely a form, and a particularly vicious form, of taxation. Having
Henry Hazlitt
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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.
Henry Hazlitt
#12. A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.
Henry Hazlitt
#13. 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
#14. Rent control, however, encourages wasteful use of space.
Henry Hazlitt
#15. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936, 1969)
Henry Hazlitt
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. If there is to be no loss whatever of dignity or self-respect in getting and staying on relief, then there can be no gain in dignity or self-respect in makings some sacrifices to keep off.
Henry Hazlitt
#19. 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
#20. It is typical of government price-fixing schemes that they escape one undesired consequence only by plunging into another and usually worse one.
Henry Hazlitt
#22. 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
#23. Everywhere the means is erected into the end, and the end itself is forgotten.
Henry Hazlitt
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Capitalism will continue to eliminate mass poverty in more and more places and to an increasingly marked extent if it is merely permitted to do so.
Henry Hazlitt
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Diluting the money supply with paper is the moral equivalent of diluting the milk supply with water.
Henry Hazlitt
#32. Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the now practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is any problem of any kind to be solved, government is the agency to step in and solve it.
Henry Hazlitt
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. What inflation really does is to change the relationships of prices and costs.
Henry Hazlitt
#37. Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.
Henry Hazlitt
#38. The typical political ploy was to load up benefits in the present and push costs into the future. Yet that future always arrived;
Henry Hazlitt
#39. If precious metals had been abundant, they would not have been precious.
Henry Hazlitt
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of human liberty, which means the future of civilization.
Henry Hazlitt
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. In order that one industry might grow or come into existence, a hundred other industries would have to shrink.
Henry Hazlitt
#49. 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
#50. It is significant that while there is a word "profiteer" to stigmatize those who make allegedly excessive profits, there is no such word as "wageer" - or "losseer.
Henry Hazlitt
#51. A hundred welfare programs, spending more and more billions, lead to chronic budget deficits, which lead to increased paper-money issues, which lead to higher prices.
Henry Hazlitt
#52. In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.
Henry Hazlitt
#53. The proposal is frequently made that the government ought to assume the risks that are "too great for private industry." This means that bureaucrats should be permitted to take risks with the tax payer's money that no one is willing to take with his own.
Henry Hazlitt
#54. Bureaucrats denounce private enterprise for the consequences of their own reckless policies and demand still more governmental controls.
Henry Hazlitt
#55. What men do not know about they take for granted. Knowledge furnishes problems, and the discovery of problems itself constitutes an intellectual advance.
Henry Hazlitt
#56. 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
#57. Contrary to a popular impression, profits are achieved not by raising prices, but by introducing economies and efficiencies that cut costs of production.
Henry Hazlitt
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. We can clarify our thinking if we put our chief emphasis where it belongs - on policies that will maximize production.
Henry Hazlitt
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. They tell us how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace.
Henry Hazlitt
#65. Prolonged inflation never 'stimulates' the economy. On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.
Henry Hazlitt
#66. 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
#67. One occupation can expand only at the expense of all other occupations.
Henry Hazlitt
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. The idea that an expanding economy implies that all industries must be simultaneously expanding is a profound error.
Henry Hazlitt
#73. 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
#74. 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.
Henry Hazlitt
#75. 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
#76. A certain amount of taxes is of course indispensable to carry on essential government functions. Reasonable taxes for this purpose need not hurt production much.
Henry Hazlitt
#77. 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
#78. Government can't give us anything without depriving us of something else.
Henry Hazlitt
#79. Eternal vigilance is the price of an open mind.
Henry Hazlitt
#80. 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
#81. What is really being lent is not money, which is merely the medium of exchange, but capital.
Henry Hazlitt
#82. The notion that we can dismiss the views of all previous thinkers surely leaves no basis for the hope that our own work will prove of any value to others.
Henry Hazlitt
#83. 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
#84. Economic progress and justice do not consist in superbly equalized destitution, but in the constant creation of more and more goods and services, of more and more wealth and income to be shared.
Henry Hazlitt
#85. And in terms of welfare, of course, the loss suffered will be much greater than the loss in merely arithmetical terms, because the psychological losses of those who are unemployed will greatly outweigh the psychological gains of those with a slightly higher income in terms of purchasing power.
Henry Hazlitt
#86. There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy.
Henry Hazlitt
#87. Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.
Henry Hazlitt
#88. 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
#89. 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.
Henry Hazlitt
#90. When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: 'Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.' It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.
Henry Hazlitt
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Saving" in short, in the modern world, is only another form of spending.
Henry Hazlitt
#94. Need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.
Henry Hazlitt
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. The surest way for a poor nation to stay poor is to harass, hobble, and straitjacket private enterprise or to discourage or destroy it by subsidized government competition, oppressive taxation, or outright expropriation.
Henry Hazlitt
#98. 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
#99. A man will put forth greater efforts to save himself from ruin than he will merely to improve his position.
Henry Hazlitt
#100. No man burns down his own house on the theory that the need to rebuild it will stimulate his energies.
Henry Hazlitt
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