The archive.

Henry Hazlitt’s “How Should Prices Be Determined?” is a concise policy essay, first published in The Freeman in February 1967, on the economic and legal problem of price formation. Its scope runs from elementary supply and demand to export supports, anti-inflation price ceilings, monopoly theory, antitrust, and the proper limits of law. The thesis appears in the opening answer, but Hazlitt’s purpose is to show why that answer rules out most official attempts to stabilize, raise, lower, or freeze prices.

This file is best read as a compact anti-guaranteed-income collection rather than as a single freestanding Hazlitt article. Hazlitt’s 1966 title chapter supplies the governing argument, but the volume is organized as a debate among proposals and contributors: Robert Theobald’s guaranteed-income circle, the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, negative-income-tax advocates such as Milton Friedman, and Hazlitt’s classical-liberal reply. Its chapters move from reformist aspirations to cost estimates, administrative design, work incentives, poor-law history, and the deeper question of whether income can be detached from production.

This brief polemical economic article distills Henry Hazlitt’s anti-Keynesian critique into a compact argument about deficit spending, money creation, and the political amnesia surrounding inflation. Its scope is deliberately narrow: Hazlitt does not rehearse Keynes’s whole system, but isolates what he sees as the operational core of Keynesian policy—government deficit spending as a remedy for depression and unemployment—and argues that this remedy necessarily tends toward inflation.

Hazlitt’s essay turns a question about Soviet agriculture into a compact restatement of the socialist calculation argument. He begins not with abstract doctrine but with an empirical puzzle: why a regime claiming scientific planning repeatedly had to buy food from the capitalist world.

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.

This is a single-author classical-liberal economic essay, originally published in The Freeman. Hazlitt’s central aim is to reverse the socialist premise that private property in productive assets is merely private privilege. His thesis is functional: property used in market production already serves a public purpose because its owner can benefit from it only by satisfying consumers.

This file is a single argumentative essay in legal and political philosophy, originally published in The Freeman in 1964. Hazlitt’s central claim is that “rights” cannot be understood as free-floating moral wishes: the concept begins in law, and even when extended to natural or moral rights it must retain the legal structure of reciprocal duties.

Henry Hazlitt’s Should We Divide the Wealth? is a single-author economic polemic, first published in The Freeman in February 1972. It is a compact survey of redistributionist proposals: equal division, guaranteed income, the negative income tax, land reform, progressive taxation, and one-time wealth leveling. Its thesis is that egalitarian programs mistake wealth for a fixed surplus rather than a flow produced by work, saving, investment, prices, and private property.

This article-length chapter surveys Herbert Spencer’s political theory within Hazlitt’s broader account of nineteenth-century theories of government. Hazlitt presents Spencer as the era’s great philosopher of evolution and as a lifelong theorist of sharply limited state power, tracing the argument from The Proper Sphere of Government and Social Statics to The Man Versus the State and The Principles of Ethics.

Hazlitt’s essay continues his inquiry into the proper limits of state power by turning from modern minimal-state theory to nineteenth-century political economy, chiefly John Stuart Mill. Mill is an especially revealing case because he inherits the liberal and laissez-faire tradition yet develops exceptions that, in Hazlitt’s reading, weaken any stable boundary around government action.

Henry Hazlitt’s The ABC of a Market Economy is a short didactic essay from The Freeman (February 1985), written as a primer on the institutional logic of markets, socialism, and intervention. Its central thesis is that economic order must rest chiefly either on voluntary exchange or political command, and that mixed systems tend to drift toward coercion unless the market principle is defended.

This single-author essay, first published in The Freeman in April 1972, is a compact polemic on the institutional logic of welfare states. Hazlitt’s central claim is that public relief and social insurance programs rarely remain confined to their original purposes. They expand in population covered, benefits promised, taxes levied, deficits incurred, and expectations created. His critique is historical, fiscal, and semantic: the welfare state grows partly by describing transfers as “insurance,” thereby making redistribution appear earned, contractual, and self-financing.