2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Sincere reformers and demagogues alike have reached for the same lever—state action—to abolish poverty, and in Hazlitt's telling they have mostly made it worse. This 1971 Freeman polemic dismantles a catalogue of political remedies: redistribution and the guaranteed income, union privilege and featherbedding, minimum-wage laws, welfare finance, price and wage controls, and finally socialism itself. His method is to look past the visible transfer to the hidden cost—who pays, whose incentives collapse, what output is never produced. A statutory wage floor, he insists, cannot conjure the productivity it names; it only prices the least-skilled out of work. Socialism's deeper failure is the calculation problem: without genuine prices for capital goods, planners cannot rank alternatives except by imitating the market they reject. Durable relief, he concludes, rests on productivity, not command.
We cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him less.
Two charges anchor the socialist case against capitalism: that it produces too little and distributes what it makes unjustly. Answering both, Hazlitt insists that nominal-dollar comparisons mislead, deflating U.S. output from 1939 to 1969 to show real income climbing across every quintile, with electricity, plumbing, automobiles and telephones passing from luxuries into ordinary working-class possessions. Against the exploitation thesis he shows payrolls dwarfing after-tax profits and argues that wages and profits rise and fall together rather than warring over a fixed fund. His sharpest move is linguistic: the very phrase 'distribution of income' falsely implies that goods are first produced and then parceled out, when in a market they are owned throughout continuous production and exchange. The cure for poverty, he concludes, is greater earning power, not redistribution.
When profits are large, it does not mean that they are at the expense of the workers. The opposite is more likely to be true.
The claim that Black Americans had been shut out of postwar prosperity is met here with income statistics arguing the reverse. Measured in constant dollars, Hazlitt shows, median Black family income rose sharply between 1949 and 1969 while the share of families under $3,000 fell steeply—gains at least fully proportional to those of white families. He concedes the persistent relative gap, Black median income climbing only from 51 to 63 percent of white, and warns against treating either group as homogeneous across region, age, and class. Rising Black teenage unemployment he blames chiefly on minimum-wage laws that price the low-skilled out of jobs, holding the free market, not regulation, to be the strongest counterforce to discrimination. The engine of advance, he concludes in this 1971 essay, is integration into an expanding capitalist economy, not a separate "black economy."
What chiefly counts is the productivity of the whole economy; what counts is the maximization of the incentives to that productivity.
Envy, in Hazlitt's diagnosis, is not the mere desire for what one lacks but resentment of another's advantage—and because its object is comparative status rather than need, no concession can satisfy it. This 1972 essay argues that redistributive politics is often driven either by envy or by the fear of it, and that forced equalization can only level downward, destroying the abundance from which wages and relief flow. Steep progressive and confiscatory inheritance taxes, he contends, punish the rich symbolically while injuring the poor by starving capital accumulation. His objective test asks not whether a policy favors equality but whether it pursues equality at the expense of abundance. Reaching for Tocqueville on pre-revolutionary France, he warns that appeasing resentment provokes more of it, and that a government paying social blackmail invites the collapse it fears.
Envy is implacable. Concessions merely whet its appetite for more concessions.
The arithmetic is deflating: confiscating every after-tax income above fifty thousand dollars in 1968, Hazlitt calculates, would have yielded barely a hundred and twenty dollars a head, and could never be repeated once those incomes ceased to be earned. That figure frames his survey of redistribution's schemes, from equal division, guaranteed income and the negative income tax he once favored to land reform, progressive taxation and one-time leveling. Each, he argues, mistakes wealth for a fixed surplus rather than a flow produced by work, saving, investment and secure property. Near-confiscatory marginal rates raise little revenue while draining the capital that becomes machines, productivity and higher wages, so they injure the poor more than the rich. Following Irving Fisher, he predicts any equal division would dissolve at once through differences in ability, luck and thrift.
Any attempt to equalize wealth and income by forced redistribution must destroy wealth and income.
Today's self-styled liberals, Hazlitt notes with relish, would be astonished to learn that the father of the welfare state they admire was Otto von Bismarck, the antiliberal apostle of blood and iron. That genealogy opens this 1972 essay's account of how relief and social insurance never stay within their original bounds—expanding in coverage, benefits, taxes, deficits, and expectations. His sharpest charge is semantic: Social Security was presented as old-age insurance, yet it redistributes across generations and income groups while preserving the language of earned entitlement, leaving OASDI an unstable hybrid that is neither honest welfare nor genuine insurance. Because beneficiaries are concentrated and costs dispersed, expansion always outpaces restraint; unfunded promises are covered by fresh paper money, making inflation a concealed tax. Unemployment compensation, he adds, blunts the incentive to keep an old job or find a new one.
This has led to chronic deficits that are met by printing more irredeemable paper money, and so to the almost universal chronic inflation that marks the present age.
Poverty can be conquered but never abolished—that distinction governs this brief 1972 essay, since some dependency is inseparable from childhood, sickness, age, and misfortune. From it Hazlitt draws his Paradox of Relief: the richer a community, the less it needs relief yet the more it can provide; the poorer, the greater the need yet the smaller the means. Relief therefore presupposes a productive surplus it cannot itself create, and government relief, he argues, prolongs the very disease it treats by dulling the incentives to work and save. Against a roster of false remedies—land reform, guaranteed income, minimum wages, union privilege, steep progressivity, socialism—he sets the individual cure of work and saving, generalized through property, prices, profit and loss, and competition into the capitalism he credits with lifting mankind out of mass poverty.
Those who truly want to help the poor will not spend their days in organizing protest marches or relief riots, or even in repeated protestations of sympathy.
Sold in 1935 as the programs that would finally end emergency relief, Social Security and unemployment compensation instead became permanent additions to it—the governing irony of this libertarian survey of American welfare through 1971. Hazlitt reads caseloads, expenditure tables, and press reports as proof of an institutional tendency to expand: national welfare rolls, he tallies, climbed from about six million in 1950 to over fourteen million by 1971. The mechanism he isolates is fiscal federalism—when a city pays only a small share of each relief dollar, it dispenses political favors cheaply and polices fraud loosely. Beneath the accounting lies a philosophical claim: once the poor are granted a right to others' income, no logical stopping place exists short of equalized incomes. The rest is a jungle of overlapping programs whose true cost no taxpayer can see.
Both Social Security and unemployment compensation were proposed in large part on the argument of Franklin D. Roosevelt and others in 1935 that they would enable the government to "quit this business of relief."
Mass poverty, Hazlitt reminds his readers, was the normal human condition until roughly the mid-eighteenth century, when capital accumulation and a run of inventions launched the Industrial Revolution and largely abolished it in advanced economies. What remains are pockets and cases of individual poverty, and here he resists every single-cause story, endorsing neither the conservative's shiftless poor nor the reformer's pure victims but a tangle of conduct, health, skill, family and luck that defeats clean moral accounting. He weighs A. G. Warner's nineteenth-century tables of 'misconduct' and 'misfortune', Edward Banfield's account of present-oriented class cultures, and modern federal correlations of poverty with age and education. The governing test for any relief, he argues, is its effect on incentives, because poverty is finally a problem of production rather than distribution.
The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen.
Hostility to capitalism recurs, Hazlitt insists, not because its defenders have argued badly but because it springs from durable human impulses. Written for The Freeman in 1973, this polemic anatomizes five of them—compassion for hardship, impatience for cures, envy, short-run thinking, and the habit of measuring real institutions against imagined ideals—and traces each to a familiar intervention: envy sustains graduated taxation, impatience breeds minimum wages and relief. At the argument's core stands the coordinating work of prices, which signal scarcity and demand, and the calculation problem that leaves socialist planners unable to know what they produce at a profit and what at a loss. Because error is politically attractive and endlessly renewed, Hazlitt concludes, the case for economic freedom must be remade in every generation.
Nine-tenths of what is written today on economic questions is either an implied or explicit attack on capitalism.
Reformers who chase an 'ideal money,' Hazlitt argues, divide into four camps, discretionary and rule-bound versions of both paper and gold, and the disorder of the mid-1970s is no accident but the fruit of the first. Discretionary fiat draws his sharpest fire: by tethering weak currencies to the dollar, Bretton Woods exported inflation across the world. Monetarism fares only marginally better, since a legislated money-growth rule would become a political football the instant recession loomed. Gold earns his defense not as nostalgia but because it cannot be conjured by statute; even so, he faults the classical fractional-reserve standard for breeding the cycle of boom and slump, and points instead toward enforceable private contracts payable in gold and a full, 100 percent reserve standard growing up beside state paper.
The great merit of gold is precisely that it is scarce; that its quantity is limited by nature; that it is costly to discover, to mine, and to process; and that it cannot be created by political fiat or caprice.
Traced back far enough, the monetary breakdown of the early 1970s begins not with Nixon but with the inflation of the First World War and the postwar myth of a gold 'shortage.' Hazlitt follows the wreckage forward through the gold-exchange standard of Genoa and Bretton Woods, where holding dollars and sterling as reserves multiplied paper claims on a shrinking gold base. Citing Jacques Rueff and John Exter, he dismisses Special Drawing Rights as politically minted paper and casts the IMF as a machine for pooling and disguising national inflation. His remedy is blunt: abolish SDRs, dismantle the Fund, halt Federal Reserve credit, balance the budget by cutting spending, and let a free gold market discover a workable conversion rate, assuming any government will abandon the ideology of perpetual inflation.
The IMF has served merely as a world inflation factory.