[Editor’s note: The following is Henry Hazlitt’s review of Man, Economy, and State published in National Review in September, 1962.] One of the unhappy casualties of World War I was the old-fashioned treatise on economic “principles.” This was a work not too technical to be read by the intelligent layman, on the one hand, nor, on the other, like
There are basically only two ways in which economic life can be organized. The first is by the voluntary choice of families and individuals and by voluntary cooperation. This arrangement has come to be known as the free market. The other is by the orders of a dictator. This is a command economy. In its more extreme form, when an organized state
[ Chapter One of The Conquest of Poverty . ] The history of poverty is almost the history of mankind. The ancient writers have left us few specific accounts of it. They took it for granted. Poverty was the normal lot.The ancient world of Greece and Rome, as modern historians reconstruct it, was a world where houses had no chimneys, and rooms,
[ Chapter Three of The Conquest of Poverty .] Any study of poverty should logically begin with a definition of the problem we are trying to solve. Precisely what is poverty? Of the thousands of books and articles on the subject that have appeared over the last two centuries, it is astonishing how few have troubled to ask this question. Their
[Chapter 7 from The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt , edited by Hans F. Sennholz (Irvington-on-Husdon, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1993).] If capitalism did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it — and its discovery would be rightly regarded as one of the great triumphs of the human mind. But as “capitalism” is merely a name for
[Chapter 13 of The Conquest of Poverty .] For more than a century the economic thinking not only of the public but of the majority of economists has been dominated by a myth — the myth that labor unions have been on the whole a highly beneficent institution, and have raised the level of real wages far above what it would have been without union
[Nota del Editor: La siguiente es la reseña de Henry Hazlitt de Hombre, economía y Estado publicada en el National Review en septiembre de 1962]. Una de las infelices víctimas de la Primera Guerra Mundial fue el anticuado tratado sobre «principios« económicos. Esta fue una obra no demasiado técnica para ser leída por el laico inteligente, por un
Básicamente, sólo hay dos maneras de organizar la vida económica. El primero es la elección voluntaria de familias e individuos y la cooperación voluntaria. Este acuerdo ha llegado a conocerse como el libre mercado. La otra es por orden de un dictador. Esta es una economía de mando. En su forma más extrema, cuando un estado organizado expropia los
[ Capítulo Uno de The Conquest of Poverty .] La historia de la pobreza es casi la historia de la humanidad. Los antiguos escritores nos han dejado pocos relatos específicos al respecto. Lo dieron por sentado. La pobreza era lo normal. El mundo antiguo de Grecia y Roma, tal como lo reconstruyen los historiadores modernos, era un mundo en el que las
[Capítulo Tres de La conquista de la pobreza ] Cualquier estudio sobre la pobreza debería lógicamente comenzar con una definición del problema que estamos tratando de resolver. ¿Qué es exactamente la pobreza? De los miles de libros y artículos sobre el tema que han aparecido en los últimos dos siglos, es sorprendente la poca gente que se ha
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The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
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