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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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Henry Hazlitt
Age: 98 †
Born: 1894
Born: November 28
Died: 1993
Died: July 8
Economist
Journalist
Philosopher
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Henry Stuart Hazlitt
Upon
Extensions
Bigs
Businessman
Encroachments
Cannot
Allies
Libertarians
Libertarian
Encroachment
Necessarily
Relied
Sorrow
Governmental
Battle
Businessmen
Learning
Extension

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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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!
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Would-be income guarantors ignore or despise the capitalistic system that makes their dreams dreamable and gives their redistribute-the-income proposals whatever plausibility they have.
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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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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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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.
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New taxes are so unpopular that most 'social' handout schemes are originally enacted without enough increased taxation to pay for them. The result is chronic government deficits, paid for by the issuance of additional paper money.
Henry Hazlitt
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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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Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.
Henry Hazlitt
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Need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.
Henry Hazlitt
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Prolonged inflation never 'stimulates' the economy. On the contrary, it unbalances, disrupts, and misdirects production and employment.
Henry Hazlitt
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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.
Henry Hazlitt
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The long-run historical tendency of capitalism has not only been to increase real incomes more or less proportionately nearly all along the line, but to benefit the masses even more than the rich.
Henry Hazlitt
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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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In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.
Henry Hazlitt