Hazlitt’s essay is a compact polemical reply to a young defender of free enterprise who faces ten recurring objections to capitalism. Rather than present a full theory of political economy, Hazlitt answers a series of charges concerning resources, monopoly, pricing, corporate power, capital access, injury, housing, wages, inequality, and moral compassion. Its central method is comparative: capitalism is not to be judged against an imagined condition of abundance and perfect virtue, but against feasible alternatives such as socialism, communism, or interventionism.
The number of faults that have been alleged against capitalism are without limit.
Hazlitt argues that most anticapitalist criticism quietly assumes that political control would remove the relevant defect. His response is that scarcity, error, self-interest, and unequal ability exist under every system, while government coercion often worsens the very conditions it is meant to repair.
Practically all the criticisms tacitly assume that the imputed faults could be easily cured by some form of socialism or communism, or some ad hoc government intervention that would, in fact, usually make the complained-about condition much worse.
The first replies establish this pattern. On natural resources, Hazlitt concedes that production uses exhaustible materials, but denies that this is a special indictment of capitalism. Any industrial order must consume resources; the question is which system best economizes, substitutes, renews, and discovers alternatives.
Capitalism does depend upon the consumption of natural resources, and some of these could eventually be depleted.
He therefore stresses capitalism’s adaptive record: market prices, profit opportunities, and private incentives encourage substitution, conservation, and replenishment where possible. This reply is characteristic of the essay as a whole, because Hazlitt often accepts a factual concern while denying the anticapitalist inference drawn from it.
But capitalism has proved resourceful in finding substitutes or for providing for renewal of resources (as in scientific forestry, for example).
On monopoly, collusion, and discriminatory pricing, Hazlitt distinguishes capitalism from coercive privilege. Free enterprise means rivalry, not immunity for predatory conduct. Price differences, including discounts to large buyers, may reflect lower costs rather than favoritism or waste. Legal restraints may be appropriate against fraud, force, and collusion, but broad state control would replace market discipline with political discretion.
Hazlitt’s treatment of capital formation likewise rejects the claim that decentralized finance unfairly excludes small producers. Savings, profits, bank loans, and private judgment are imperfect filters, but a government agency allocating capital would not abolish scarcity; it would politicize credit and invite favoritism, corruption, and waste. Corporate misconduct is acknowledged, yet treated as a problem to be met through stockholder oversight, law enforcement, and competitive loss rather than through wholesale replacement of private ownership.
The essay also challenges statistical and moral critiques. Hazlitt questions confident claims about national “productivity,” especially in a service economy, because value cannot be reduced to physical output alone. On workplace injuries, housing, and wages, he again emphasizes tradeoffs: compulsory equalization of pay or housing would weaken the incentives that generate production, employment, and improvement. Legal compassion, in his view, can become destructive when it overrides the price and wage signals that coordinate economic life.
The final moral charge is that capitalism is “inhuman.” Hazlitt answers by separating voluntary charity from compulsory redistribution. Capitalism does not guarantee equal outcomes or universal benevolence, but it creates the abundance from which private generosity and public assistance can be financed. Its humanity, for Hazlitt, lies less in sentiment than in productivity: it sustains larger populations and higher living standards than command systems can.
The closing diagnosis explains the title. Hazlitt contends that critics often blame capitalism for evils produced by a mixed economy already burdened by taxes, minimum wage laws, union coercion, subsidies, and regulation. Intervention creates unemployment, shortages, distortions, and dependence; these results are then attributed to capitalism, generating demands for still more intervention. The essay’s enduring claim is therefore not merely that capitalism is defensible, but that anticapitalism grows by misreading the failures of “sabotaged” capitalism as failures of the market itself.
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