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

Henry Hazlitt

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Henry Hazlitt
Age: 98 †
Born: 1894
Born: November 28
Died: 1993
Died: July 8
Economist
Journalist
Philosopher
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Henry Stuart Hazlitt
Government
Firsts
Nothing
First
Anybody
Take
Doesn
Giving
Else
Someone
Give

More quotes by Henry Hazlitt

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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.
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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
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Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.
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Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man
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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
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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.
Henry Hazlitt
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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
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..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
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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
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A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.
Henry Hazlitt
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If precious metals had been abundant, they would not have been precious.
Henry Hazlitt
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Some champions of ever-greater governmental power and spending invent the theory that the taxpayers, left to themselves, spend the money they have earned very foolishly, on all sorts of trivialities and rubbish, and that only the bureaucrats, by first seizing it from them, will know how to spend it wisely.
Henry Hazlitt
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A Day never passes without some ardent reformer or group of reformers suggesting some new government intervention, some new statist scheme to fill some alleged 'need' or relieve some alleged distress.
Henry Hazlitt
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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
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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.
Henry Hazlitt
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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
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What is put into the hands of B cannot be put into the hands of A.
Henry Hazlitt
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Bureaucrats denounce private enterprise for the consequences of their own reckless policies and demand still more governmental controls.
Henry Hazlitt
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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
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For every alleged benefit that the politicians confer upon us, they must necessarily deprive us of something else.
Henry Hazlitt