Henry Hazlitt famous quotes

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

#Government #Order #Credit

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

#Government #Citizens #Littles

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

#Men #Study #Economics

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

#Hard Work #Mean #Civilization

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

#Philosophy #Successful #Government

The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Cheating #Freedom #Hate

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

#Taken #Political #Income

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

#Political #Liberty #Facts

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

#Art #Groups #Economics

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Selfish #Men #Medicine

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Men #Thinking #Vocabulary

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

#Memories #Reading #Practice

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

#Past #Errors #Ideas

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

#Real #Income #Investing

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

#Government #Income #Incentives

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

#Yesterday #Today #Tomorrow

The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economists sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Eye #Groups #Looks

..either 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

#Light #Government #Miracle

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

#Hands #Quality #Gold

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

#Taken #Liberty #Gold

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.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Dream #Honesty #Lying

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

#Government #Giving #Firsts

There is a strange idea aboard, held by all monetary cranks, that credit is something a banker gives to a man. Credit, on the contrary, is something a man already has. He has it, perhaps, because he already has marketable assets of a greater cash value than the loan for which he is asking. Or he has it because his character and past record have earned it. He brings it into the bank with him. That is why the banker makes him the loan.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Character #Past #Men

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

#Order #Might #Hundred

The most obvious and yet the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing ‘money’ with ‘wealth’…Real wealth, of course, consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. It is railways and roads and motor cars; ships and planes and factories; schools and churches and theaters; pianos, paintings and books. Yet so powerful is the verbal ambiguity that confuses money with wealth, that even those who at times recognize the confusion will slide back into it in the course of their reasoning.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Powerful #Real #Book

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

#Mean #Government #People

All loans, in the eyes of honest borrowers, must eventually be repaid. All credit is debt. Proposals for an increased volume of credit, therefore, are merely another name for proposals for an increased burden of debt. They would seem considerably less inviting if they were habitually referred to by the second name instead of by the first.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Eye #Names #Firsts

There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: 'In the long run we are all dead.' And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Running #Father #Son

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

#Precious Metal #Metals

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.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Real #Balance #Income

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

#Real #Looks #Wages

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

#Hands

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

#Government #Giving #Political

It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Men #Errors #Trying

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

#Employment #Way #Economics

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves."
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Government #Debt #World

Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Self #Hands #Government

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

#Character #Men #Self

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

#Loss #Views #Risk

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

#Piano #Trying #Unemployment

The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible. Among men of good will such an aim can be taken for granted. The real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Running #Real #Taken

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

#Political #Gold #Merit

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

#Running #Long #Pay

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

#Justice #Three #Capitalist

The future of human liberty ... means the future of civilization.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Mean #Civilization #Liberty

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

#Mean #Forgotten #Ends

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.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Men #Community #Permit

Yet it ought to be clear that a minimum wage law is, at best, a limited weapon for combatting the evil of low wages, and that the possible good to be achieved by such a law can exceed the possible harm only in proportion as its aims are modest. The more ambitious such a law is, the larger the number of workers it attempts to cover, and the more it attempts to raise their wages, the more likely are its harmful effects to exceed its good effects.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Law #Numbers #Evil

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.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Men #Cities #People

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!
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Thinking #Blue #Sky

Need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Needs #Demand #Economic

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

#Benefits #Politician

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

#World #Incentives #Way

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

#Real #Wages #Pay

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

#Poverty #Mass #Capitalism

When people who earn more than the average have their 'surplus', or the greater part of it, seized from them in taxes, and when people who earn less than average have the deficiency , or the greater part of it, turned over to them in hand-outs and doles, the production of all must sharply decline; for the energetic and able who lose their incentive to produce more than the average, and the slothful and unskilled lose their incentive to improve their condition.
-- Henry Hazlitt

#Average #Hands #People

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

#Employment #Economy #Inflation