Henry Hazlitt, “On Appeasing Envy” — Summary

The file is a single-author political-economic essay/chapter. Its scope is narrow but ambitious: Hazlitt treats envy as a moral-psychological force behind redistributive politics and argues that policies designed to placate it are economically destructive and politically self-defeating. The thesis is announced at once:

Any attempt to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income.

Hazlitt’s target is not all poverty relief, but coercive equalization when equality is valued above abundance. He begins by framing egalitarian politics as often driven either by envy itself or by the political fear of envy:

There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy, while still others are motivated, not so much by any envy of their own, as by the fear of it in others, and the wish to appease or satisfy it.

The first conceptual move is psychological. Envy, for Hazlitt, is not simply desire for what one lacks; it is resentment of another’s advantage, especially when that advantage is near enough to seem personally humiliating. Hence it cannot be satisfied by modest concessions, because its object is comparative status rather than need.

The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge.

This is why appeasement fails: every concession reveals a remaining inequality. Hazlitt condenses the mechanism into a hard political maxim:

Envy is implacable. Concessions merely whet its appetite for more concessions.

He nevertheless distinguishes destructive envy from productive aspiration. Competition, ambition, and emulation are not condemned; what he rejects is the negative impulse that prefers another’s loss to one’s own improvement.

(We should, of course, always distinguish that merely negative envy which begrudges others their advantage from the positive ambition that leads men to active emulation, competition, and creative effort of their own.)

The essay then shifts from motives to policy tests. Since motives are hard to prove and not decisive in themselves, Hazlitt proposes an objective distinction: does a policy primarily relieve poverty, or does it sacrifice general prosperity in order to reduce inequality?

But the main objective test of a social proposal is not merely whether it emphasizes equality more than abundance, but whether it goes further and attempts to promote equality at the expense of abundance.

He applies this test to progressive income taxes and confiscatory inheritance taxes, which he claims reduce capital accumulation, investment, productivity, and real wages. Their symbolic punishment of the rich, in his account, ultimately injures the poor. The middle of the essay therefore turns “equality” from an abstract moral ideal into a question of economic consequences: redistribution meant to humble wealth may diminish the very abundance from which wages and welfare depend.

The final section answers the argument that such policies are politically necessary to prevent unrest. Hazlitt reverses it:

This argument is the reverse of the truth. The effect of trying to appease envy is to provoke more of it.

To support this claim he invokes Tocqueville’s interpretation of the French Revolution: revolutions need not arise when conditions are worst, but when improvement makes remaining inequalities newly visible and intolerable. The danger lies in awakened expectations and the sense of “almost” equality.

The state of things destroyed by a revolution is almost always somewhat better than that which immediately preceded it; and experience has shown that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that when it enters upon the work of reform.

Hazlitt also stresses Tocqueville’s warning that sympathetic rhetoric by elites may inflame resentment rather than calm it:

The very men who had most to fear from the fury of the people declaimed loudly in their presence on the cruel injustice under which the people had always suffered.

The essay’s relevance lies in this fusion of economics, political psychology, and historical warning. Hazlitt is not merely arguing against high taxes; he is arguing against a mode of politics that treats resentment as a claim to be purchased off. His conclusion preserves room for genuine anti-poverty measures, but rejects reforms undertaken to placate agitators or display guilt. The closing principle is deliberately severe:

A government that pays social blackmail will precipitate the very consequences that it fears.