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The sad fact is that today most of the heads of big businesses in America have become so confused or intimidated that, so far from carrying the free market to argument to the enemy, they fail to defend themselves adequately even when attacked.

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
Free
Defend
Fact
Heads
Bigs
Confused
Facts
Fail
Adequately
Become
Market
Intimidated
America
Argument
Attacked
Today
Failing
Carrying
Even
Enemy
Businesses

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A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the now practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is any problem of any kind to be solved, government is the agency to step in and solve it.
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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.
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For every alleged benefit that the politicians confer upon us, they must necessarily deprive us of something else.
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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.
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Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.
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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.
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Prolonged inflation never 'stimulates' the economy. On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.
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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.
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Once the idea is accepted that money is something whose supply is determined simply by the printing press, it becomes impossible for the politicians in power to resist the constant demands for further inflation.
Henry Hazlitt
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The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been to increase at an exponential rate.
Henry Hazlitt
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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.
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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
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Diluting the money supply with paper is the moral equivalent of diluting the milk supply with water.
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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.
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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.
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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