Quotes from Henry Hazlitt

The best wage rates for labor are not the highest wage rates, but the wage rates that permit full production, full employment and the largest sustained payrolls.

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

Proposals for an increased volume of credit, therefore, are merely another name for proposals for an increased burden of debt. They would seem considerably less inviting if they were habitually referred to by the second name instead of by the first.

one occupation can expand only at the expense of all other occupations.

what is really being lent is not money, which is merely the medium of exchange, but capital.

Prices are determined by supply and demand, and demand is determined by how intensely people want a commodity and what they have to offer in exchange for it.

What a commodity has cost to produce in the past cannot determine its value. That will depend on the present relationship of supply and demand.

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.

Functional prices are those that encourage the largest volume of production and the largest volume of sales. Functional wages are those that tend to bring about the highest volume of employment and the largest real payrolls.

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.

For the amount of real capital at any moment (as distinguished from monetary tokens run off on a printing press) is limited. What is put into the hands of B cannot be put into the hands of A.

the larger part of the 50,000 English stocking knitters and their families did not fully emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the machine for the next forty years.

Up to a certain point it is necessary to produce shoes. But it is also necessary to produce coats, shirts, trousers, homes, plows, shovels, factories, bridges, milk and bread. It would be idiotic to go on piling up mountains of surplus shoes, simply because we could do it, while hundreds of more urgent needs went unfilled.

Full employment—very full employment; long, weary, back-breaking employment—is characteristic of precisely the nations that are most retarded industrially.

The government never lends or gives anything to business that it does not take away from business.

If we look at it now from the consumer's point of view, we find that he can buy less with his money. Because he has to pay more for sweaters and other protected goods, he can buy less of everything else. The general purchasing power of his income has therefore been reduced.

The volume is therefore primarily one of exposition. It makes no claim to originality with regard to any of the chief ideas that it expounds. Rather its effort is to show that many of 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.

The idea that an expanding economy implies that all industries must be simultaneously expanding is a profound error.

It is as foolish to try to preserve obsolescent industries as to try to preserve obsolescent methods of production: this is often, in fact, merely two ways of describing the same thing.

Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself

It is exports that pay for imports, and vice versa. The greater exports we have, the greater imports we must have, if we ever expect to get paid.

The interest rate is merely the special name for the price of loaned capital. It is a price like any other.

As Morris R. Cohen has remarked: "The notion that we can dismiss the views of all previous thinkers surely leaves no basis for the hope that our own work will prove of any value to others."1