Quotes from Henry Hazlitt

either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation.

whole more than it produces. The best way to raise wages, therefore, is to raise marginal labor productivity. This can be done by many methods: by an increase in capital accumulation—

What inflation really does is to change the relationships of prices and costs.

Taxation for public housing destroys as many jobs in other lines as it creates in housing.

But need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power.

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.

So the government launches on a gigantic housing program—at the taxpayers' expense.

No one could think that the destruction of war was an economic advantage who began by thinking first of all of the people whose property was destroyed. Those

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family," said Adam Smith's strong common sense in reply to the sophists of his time, "can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.

If, therefore, the X industry is driven out of existence by a minimum wage law, then the workers previously employed in that industry will be forced to turn to alternative courses that seemed less attractive to them in the first place.

So government policy should be directed, not to imposing more burdensome requirements on employers, but to following policies that encourage profits, that encourage employers to expand, to invest in newer and better machines to increase the productivity of workers—

The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible. Among men of good will such an aim can be taken for granted. The real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.

There is no more certain way to deter employment than to harass and penalize employers. There is no more certain way to keep wages low than to destroy every incentive to investment in new and more efficient machines and equipment.

unions, though they may for a time be able to secure an increase in money wages for their members, partly at the expense of employers and more at the expense of nonunionized workers, cannot, in the long-run and for the whole body of workers, increase real wages at all.

It is typical of government price-fixing schemes that they escape one undesired consequence only by plunging into another and usually worse one.

Just as there is no technical improvement that would not hurt someone, so there is no change in public taste or morals, even for the better, that would not hurt someone.

Each of us must also sell something, even if for most of us it is our own services rather than goods, in order to get the purchasing power to buy.

The typical political ploy was to load up benefits in the present and push costs into the future. Yet that future always arrived;

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 (or, if the money was borrowed, that eventually must be expropriated in taxes).

In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest.

people are becoming aware that government has nothing to give them without first taking it away from somebody else—or from themselves. Increased handouts to selected groups mean merely increased taxes, or increased deficits and increased inflation.

Who subsidizes the consumers will depend upon the incidence of taxation. But men in their role of taxpayers will be subsidizing themselves in their role of consumers. It becomes a little difficult to trace in this maze precisely who is subsidizing whom. What is forgotten is that subsidies are paid for by someone, and that no method has been discovered by which the community gets something for nothing.

Though the legislation follows the rise of the prevailing market wage rate, the myth continues to be built up that it is the minimum wage legislation that has raised the market wage.