225 Quotes by Henry Hazlitt

The system of capitalism, of the market economy, is a system of freedom, of justice, of productivity. But these three virtues cannot be separated. Each flows out of the other.

Capitalism will continue to eliminate mass poverty in more and more places and to an increasingly marked extent if it is merely permitted to do so.

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

Socialists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized destitution were preferable to “maldistributed” plenty. A national income that is rapidly growing in absolute terms for practically everyone will be deplored because it is making the rich richer.

Rent control, however, encourages wasteful use of space.

The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the “new” economics, is to concentrate on the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole.

The government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from someone else.

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.

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.