[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,
[ 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
[ Capítulo 20 de The Conquest of Poverty . ] El tema de este libro es la conquista de la pobreza, no su “abolición”. La pobreza puede ser aliviada o reducida, y en el mundo occidental en los últimos doscientos años ha sido casi milagrosamente aliviada y reducida; pero la pobreza es en última instancia individual, y la pobreza individual no puede
[Capítulo 19 de La conquista de la pobreza (1996)] Propiedad privada, fines públicos Socialistas y comunistas proponen remediar la pobreza confiscando la propiedad privada, en particular la de los medios de producción, y poniéndola en manos del gobierno. Lo que los defensores de los planes de expropiación no comprenden es que la propiedad que los
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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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