Quotes by Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt (economic journalist, 1894-1993)... However I would add the accolade "philosopher" per the tremendous work in his 1964 book The Foundations of Morality, outdone by his shorter but noteworthy effort Economics In One Lesson (both free as ebooks at www.Mises.org)...

“The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.”

“When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”

“The thing so great that “private capital could not have built it” has in fact been built by private capital—the capital that was expropriated in taxes”

“Inflation itself is a form of taxation. It is perhaps the worst possible form, which usually bears hardest on those least able to pay.”

“It is typical of government price (or minimum wage) fixing schemes that they escape one undesired consequence only by plunging into another and usually worse one.”

“Therefore, for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else.”

“Mere inflation-that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices-may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.”

“There is a strange idea abroad, held by all monetary cranks, that credit is something a banker gives to a man. Credit, on the contrary, is something a man already has. He has it, perhaps, because he already has marketable assets of a greater cash value than the loan for which he is asking. Or he has it because his character and past record have earned it. He brings it into the bank with him. That is why the banker makes him the loan. The banker is not giving something for nothing.”

“The more war destroys, the more it impoverishes, the greater is the postwar need. Indubitably. But need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.”

“When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: "Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun." It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.”

“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.”

...and lastly on a slightly different but brilliant note...

“A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.”

Come let us Reason. Peace is always a Choice.