Henry Hazlitt Quotes

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!

Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment.

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man

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.

The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.

The envious are more likely to be mollified by seeing others deprived of some advantage than by gaining it for themselves. It is not what they lack that chiefly troubles them, but what others have.

The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn't first take from someone else.

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.

There is no more certain way to deter employment than to harass and penalize employers.

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!

Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.

Inflation is a form of tax, a tax that we all collectively must pay.

Government can't give us anything without depriving us of something else.

Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.

The real solution to the problem of poverty consists in finding how to increase the employment and earning power of the poor.

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.

Inflation is not only unnecessary for economic growth. As long as it exists it is the enemy of economic growth.

Government planning always involves compulsion.

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.'

A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.

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.

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.

The system of capitalism, of the market economy, is a system of freedom, of justice, of productivity. But these three virtues cannot be separated. Each flows out of the other.

need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.

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!

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.

We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.

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.

The only real cure for poverty is production.

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.

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.

The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been to increase at an exponential rate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prolonged inflation never 'stimulates' the economy. On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.

If precious metals had been abundant, they would not have been precious.

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.

What is put into the hands of B cannot be put into the hands of A.

A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.

In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.

Bureaucrats denounce private enterprise for the consequences of their own reckless policies and demand still more governmental controls.

There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy.

In order that one industry might grow or come into existence, a hundred other industries would have to shrink.

For every alleged benefit that the politicians confer upon us, they must necessarily deprive us of something else.

Everywhere the means is erected into the end, and the end itself is forgotten.

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.

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.

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.