Henry Hazlitt on Marxism

The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are.  Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community.  Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others.  Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.

~ Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt on government spending

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for.  The world is full of so-called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing.  They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because ‘we owe it to ourselves.’ 

~ Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt on how FDR suspended gold conversion for Americans in April 1933

The possibility of a discriminatory capital-gains tax on gold ‘profits,’ or even of outright confiscation, cannot be wholly dismissed.  We must remember that in 1933, when private citizens began to exercise their clear legal right to convert their Federal Reserve notes and gold certificates into gold, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suspended the conversion, ordered the citizens to exchange their gold for paper money, and made it illegal for private citizens to hold or own gold.  In other words, the government not only broke its solemn and explicit pledge to convert its notes into gold on demand, but treated the holder (and dupe) who had taken the pledge seriously as the real culprit.  And the Supreme Court later upheld the president’s act and the new law. 

~ Henry Hazlitt

1933 St. Gaudens $20, world's most valuable coin,
sold at auction for $18.9 million in 2021

Henry Hazlitt on how Austrian economics differs from orthodox economics

Perhaps something should be said about the chief differences today between Austrian economics and what we may call "orthodox" or "mainstream" economics.  The difficulty here is that "mainstream" economics itself would be hard to define.  Economists are still divided into a number of recognizable "schools": neoclassicists, Keynesians, the Chicago School, the Lausanne School, and so on.  The limits of space forbid me to go into the distinguishing doctrines of each of these schools.  But one outstanding difference of the Austrians from all of these lies in their method of reasoning.  The Austrians emphasize methodological individualism.  That is, they not only begin by emphasizing human actions, preferences, and decisions, but individual actions, preferences, and initiatives.  Mainstream economists are concerned with "macroeconomics," with averages and aggregates; and those of the Lausanne School, trying to reduce economics to an "exact" science, and therefore seeking to quantify everything, are obsessed with complicated mathematical equations that try to stipulate the conditions of "general equilibrium."

~ Henry Hazlitt, "Understanding 'Austrian' Economics," The Freeman, February 1981

Henry Hazlitt on economics

The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence.  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.

~ Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, Chapter 1: "The Lesson," p. 17

Henry Hazlitt on the differences between the good and bad economist

The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist looks beyond.  The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences.  The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

~ Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, Chapter 1: "The Lesson," p. 16

Henry Hazlitt on Marxism

The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are.  Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community.  Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others...  This basic hatred is the heart of Marxism.

~ Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt on why economics is prone to fallacies

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine — the special pleading of selfish interests.

 ~ Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson (1946)

New York Times publisher tells Henry Hazlitt that it can no longer fight Bretton Woods

Now Henry, when 43 governments sign an agreement, I don't see how the [New York] Times can any longer combat this.

~ Arthur Sulzberger, New York Times publisher, mid-1960s?

Henry Hazlitt on the fight for liberty (70th birthday)

None of us are yet on the torture rack; we are not yet in jail...; what we mainly risk is merely our popularity, the danger that we will be called nasty names.

We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us... Even those of us who have reached and passed our 70th birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives dozing in the Florida sun.  The times call for courage.  The times call for hard work.  But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher.  They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization.

~ Henry Hazlitt, at his 70th birthday celebration, around November 28, 1964

Ludwig von Mises pays tribute to Henry Hazlitt on his 70th birthday

In this age of the great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you are our leader.  You have indefatigably fought against the step-by-step advance of the powers anxious to destroy everything that human civilization has created over a long period of centuries...  You are the economic conscience of our country and of our nation... Every friend of freedom may today, in this post-election month, be rather pessimistic about the future [LBJ had been just elected POTUS]...  [If we succeed] this will be to a great extent your merit, the fruit of the work that you have done in the first 70 years of your life.

~ Ludwig von Mises, paying tribute to his good friend Henry Hazlitt at a gathering of friends in celebration of his 70th birthday, around November 28, 1964

Walter Block endorses Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson

People instinctively are anti-market.  And it takes an effort of will, or understanding, or knowledge of the sort that Henry Hazlitt so magnificently supplies [in Economics in One Lesson] to pierce through this ignorance.

Walter Block, interview with Jeffrey Tucker about Economics in One Lesson, (9:04), 2008

Henry Hazlitt on inflation and credit expansion

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, “'Indexing': The Wrong Way Out,” The Freeman, May 1977

Henry Hazlitt on government theft

Government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else.

~ Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt on the broken gold promise

We have forgotten that our currency unit, the dollar, was originally a pledge. It was a solemn pledge by the U.S. Government to pay its bearer on demand 1/20th of an ounce of gold. Our government disdainfully repudiated that pledge in 1933. It made another pledge to pay 1/35th of an ounce, not to our own people but to foreign central banks. That pledge was repudiated in 1971.

~ Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt on paper money vs. a gold standard

When a country is not on a gold standard, when its citizens are not even permitted to own gold, when they are told that irredeemable paper money is just as good, when they are compelled to accept payment in such paper of debts or pensions that are owed to them, when what they have put aside, for retirement or old age, in savings banks or insurance policies, consists of this irredeemable paper money, then they are left without protection as the issue of this paper money is increased and the purchasing power of each unit falls; then they can be completely impoverished by the political decisions of the “monetary managers.”

~ Henry Hazlitt