[Newsweek column from March 21, 1949, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt .] Tablets, said to be 200 years older than the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, have just been translated which show that the ancient kingdom of Eshnunna had wage control and price control. The news ought not to have come as a surprise. For the
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
In 1884, Herbert Spencer wrote what quickly became a celebrated book, The Man versus the State . The book is seldom referred to now, and gathers dust on library shelves—if, in fact, it is still stocked by many libraries. Spencer’s political views are regarded by most present-day writers, who bother to mention him at all, as “extreme laissez
[This article was written from London and published in Newsweek , June 2, 1947.] England’s major economic troubles today seem not so much the result of its war losses, appalling as these were, as of its postwar policies. Temporary impoverishment was inevitable, but the postwar series of special crises in coal, food, and dollars was not. The
[Excerpted from The Foundations of Morality by Henry Hazlitt.] 1. The Contribution of Hume David Hume, probably the greatest of British philosophers, made three major contributions to ethics. The first was the naming and consistent application of “the principle of utility.” The second was his account of sympathy. The third, no less important than
[ 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,
What is the Mises Institute?
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.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.