The World is locked today in a fierce war of ideologies, in some ways strangely resembling the wars of religion in the Middle Ages. The doctrinal points at issue in those wars have become unintelligible to most of us today, and there are some equally strange paradoxes in the present ideological war. The Communists, who started it, not only know
One would get the impression, reading most of the discussions in today’s American newspapers and magazines, that no one had ever thought of doing anything for the poor until Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930’s, or even until President Johnson’s “war on poverty” in the 1960’s. Yet private charity is as old as mankind; and the history of
[ Clipping Note no. 95, Foundation for Economic Education (1959). Excerpted from Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson .] It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. The reason is that the bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of
[Newsweek column from May 26, 1952, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.] At his press conference on May 8, Mr. Truman, asked whether the chief danger was inflation or deflation, replied that the country had to guard against both: and that was why it was necessary to have control powers — to prevent either one. There
[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
[Newsweek column from May 9, 1949, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.] We are now being told that our prosperity has been kept going in the last few years by our huge government spending, particularly on armaments and foreign aid. Any decline in this spending, we are now warned, would bring a recession. We are
[Newsweek column from May 16, 1955, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.] Once a government bureaucracy has been set up to do any job whatever, it will find endless excuses for expanding, prolonging, or perpetuating that job. This is the sad history of our postwar foreign aid. Originally urged by Secretary Marshall
[Newsweek column from February 20, 1956, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.] H.L. Mencken, who died on Jan. 29, was the outstanding American literary critic of his generation, its most influential stylist, its most prominent iconoclast, the chief scourge of the genteel tradition, and a great liberating force. I
[Newsweek column from February 3, 1947, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.] Now that the International Monetary Fund is no longer a dream but a reality, all the problems that were so lightly set aside by the rhetoric and propaganda used to get the plan adopted by Congress are beginning to emerge in their full
[Newsweek column from September 22, 1947, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.] Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. Lenin was certainly right. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in
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.