Hazlitt, Henry, “The Cure for Poverty,” in The Conquest of Poverty (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996), chap. 20. Originally published by Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y., 1973. Reprinted and made available online by the Mises Institute, 2015. [ Chapter 20 of The Conquest of Poverty , 1996. ] The theme of this
Hazlitt, Henry, The Conquest of Poverty (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, [1976, 1973] 1996), pp. 210–28. [ Chapter 19 of The Conquest of Poverty (1996) ] The socialists and communists propose to cure poverty by seizing private property, particularly property in the means of production, and turning it over to be
Hazlitt, Henry, “The Torrent of Laws,” The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt , ed. Hans Sennholz (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1993), chap. 15. Originally appeared in the January 1979 issue of The Freeman . All over the United States, if you are reading this in a daylight hour, there is a ceaseless downpour of new laws.
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. Excerpted from
The broken-window fallacy, under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics. Excerpted from Economics in One Lesson , pp. 11-13.
[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
Any attempt to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize downward. This has even been caustically described as their intention. “Your levellers,” said Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century, “wish to
[From Money, the Market, and the State , edited by Nicholas B. Beales and L. Aubrey Drewry, Jr., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968, pp. 35–44.] The quantity theory of money is very old. But it has been most influential in the last half century in the form given it by Irving Fisher in The Purchasing Power of Money (1911). I shall refer to
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,
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