List of Henry Hazlitt Quotes

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.

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.

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.

What Is Put Into The Hands Of B Cannot Be Put Into The Hands Of A.

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!

Need Is Not Demand. Effective Economic Demand Requires Not Merely Need But Corresponding Purchasing Power.

The Tendency Of Welfare Spending In The United States Has Been To Increase At An Exponential Rate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In A Free Enterprise System, With An Honest And Stable Money, There Is Dominantly A Close Link Between Effort And Productivity, On The One Hand, And Economic Reward On The Other. Inflation Severs This Link. Reward Comes To Depend Less And Less On Effort And Production, And More And More On Successful Gambling And Luck.