Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Henry Hazlitt
Age: 98 †
Born: 1894
Born: November 28
Died: 1993
Died: July 8
Economist
Journalist
Philosopher
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Henry Stuart Hazlitt
Looking
Group
Art
Merely
Tracing
Effects
Immediate
Groups
Consists
Policy
Libertarian
Longer
Consequences
Liberty
Economics
Economic
Consequence

More quotes by Henry Hazlitt

Image
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
Image
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
Image
The capitalist system has lifted mankind out of mass poverty. It is this system that in the last century, in the last generation, even in the last decade, has acceleratively been changing the face of the world, and has provided the masses of mankind with amenities that even kings did not possess or imagine a few generations ago.
Henry Hazlitt
Image
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
Image
Diluting the money supply with paper is the moral equivalent of diluting the milk supply with water.
Henry Hazlitt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.
Henry Hazlitt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Bureaucrats denounce private enterprise for the consequences of their own reckless policies and demand still more governmental controls.
Henry Hazlitt
Image
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.
Henry Hazlitt
Image
If precious metals had been abundant, they would not have been precious.
Henry Hazlitt
Image
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