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The surest way for a poor nation to stay poor is to harass, hobble, and straitjacket private enterprise or to discourage or destroy it by subsidized government competition, oppressive taxation, or outright expropriation.

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
Poor
Taxation
Straitjacket
Government
Enterprise
Harass
Way
Destroy
Subsidized
Competition
Outright
Private
Discourage
Nation
Oppressive
Stay
Surest
Expropriation
Nations
Discouraging
Hobble

More quotes by Henry Hazlitt

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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
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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.
Henry Hazlitt
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It is possible to increase paper-money income to any amount by debasing the currency. But real income can only be increased by working harder or more efficiently, saving more, investing more, and producing more.
Henry Hazlitt
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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
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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 man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.
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.
Henry Hazlitt
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Capitalism will continue to eliminate mass poverty in more and more places and to an increasingly marked extent if it is merely permitted to do so.
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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The only way government bureaucrats know of keeping prosperity going is to inflate some more - to increase the deficit or to pump more money into the system.
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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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.
Henry Hazlitt
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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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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
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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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Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.'
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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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
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Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.
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