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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.

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
Country
Short
Reward
Poverty
Bought
Growth
Efforts
Severing
Progress
Connection
Sighted
Economic
Rewards
Dearly
Effort
Destroy
Totalitarian
State
Connections
Impatient
States
Lead
Wipe

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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A certain amount of taxes is of course indispensable to carry on essential government functions. Reasonable taxes for this purpose need not hurt production much.
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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.
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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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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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The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn't first take from someone else.
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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.
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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.
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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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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
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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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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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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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The tendency of welfare spending in the United States has been to increase at an exponential rate.
Henry Hazlitt
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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.
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In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.
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The only real cure for poverty is production.
Henry Hazlitt
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Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.
Henry Hazlitt