2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Friedman's proposal for a legislated rule fixing steady annual growth in the money stock is the target here, though Hazlitt takes care to salute the free-market economist behind it. Monetarists are right that money matters, he grants, but wrong to lean on a mechanical quantity theory: the value of money, like any good, is set by supply, demand, and subjective valuation, not by the arithmetic of MV = PT. He walks through the three stages of inflation, argues that a currency's quality and its holders' expectations move prices as surely as its quantity, and exposes 'velocity' as an after-the-fact excuse. The fatal defect, though, is political, hand the money supply to legislators and every recession becomes an argument for printing more.
So far as quantity is concerned, it is the expected future quantity of money, rather than the immediately existing quantity, that determines the exchange value of the monetary unit.
Where Hayek would let private banks issue competing paper currencies held to value by reputation alone, Hazlitt draws a firm line. Reviewing Choice in Currency and Denationalization of Money, he embraces the assault on legal-tender monopoly, repeal the tender laws, he agrees, and let citizens contract in gold, Swiss francs, or D-marks so that an inflating state punishes itself as users flee its notes. But American free banking, with its worthless Michigan banknotes and recurrent panics, teaches him to distrust irredeemable private paper and Hayek's vague commodity-basket 'ducat.' Sound private money, he counters, must be gold or silver certificates redeemable on demand, treated like warehouse receipts, with overissue prosecuted as fraud. The result he wants is not denationalized fiat but denationalized custody of a full-reserve metallic standard.
If it continued to inflate, its citizens would forsake its money for other currencies. Inflation would no longer pay.
No new supranational money is needed to steady world trade, so Hazlitt answers the industrialist Konosuke Matsushita, whose plea for a single global currency followed the yen-dollar swings and the collapse of the Smithsonian agreement. The world already had such a currency, in all but name, from the 1870s to 1914: the gold standard bound the major currencies not to one another but each to a fixed weight of gold, with no central issuer at all. Instability, Hazlitt insists, springs from divergent national inflation, not shifting balances of payments, and the IMF he brands the problem rather than the cure. His prescription is national responsibility, limit each currency's quantity, allow private gold coinage and certificates, restore 100 percent convertibility, perhaps behind a shared unit, the 'goldgram.'
The truth is that the world once did have a common currency, in everything but name. It had such a currency roughly from the last third of the nineteenth century to 1914. It was known as the gold standard.
Should the ruin of fiat inflation ever open a path back to gold, Hazlitt argues in this 1979 essay, that path must not lead back to the nineteenth-century fractional standard but to a full 100 percent reserve. Fractional reserves, in his account, are not a clever economy on scarce gold but the very flaw that destroys every gold standard: they let banks pile multiple claims on a limited base, lower interest rates artificially, and finance booms that must end in liquidation. He tracks the pattern through the Federal Reserve's layered credit pyramid, dismisses the notion of self-liquidating business loans, and stages the open-economy version in an imagined Ruritania whose credit expansion drains its gold. The result fuses Austrian trade-cycle theory with a demand for monetary constitutionalism.
In short, the fractional gold standard tends almost inevitably to become more and more attenuated, and while it does so it permits and encourages progressive inflation.
Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia had revived the case for a state confined to protecting against force, theft, fraud, and broken contracts — and Hazlitt's review both cheers the destination and quarrels with the road to it. He accepts Nozick's derivation of a minimal state from competing protective associations, and admires the entitlement theory that treats holdings as the historical residue of labor, exchange, gift, and inheritance rather than a central stock for the state to pattern. But he rejects the natural-rights scaffolding beneath it, judging natural law too contradictory to ground politics, and offers a rule-utilitarian defense instead: rules against violence and fraud are justified because their general observance makes cooperation possible. Brilliant against anarchism and Marxian exploitation, the book strikes him as digressive and, by its author's own admission, unfinished.
Two noteworthy implications are that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection.
Robert Frost's fork in the road supplies the governing image: a society that keeps choosing government intervention travels a path that grows harder to leave the longer it is followed. Surveying the decades after the Foundation for Economic Education's 1946 founding, Hazlitt traces one recurring pattern across Bretton Woods and the collapse of gold convertibility, minimum-wage floors that price low-productivity workers out of jobs, unemployment insurance that lengthens joblessness, rent control that starves buildings of maintenance, and OPEC-era oil price controls. Each measure suppresses prices or defers costs, then becomes politically irreversible as constituencies organize around the distortion. Beneath the critique lies a positive claim: prices transmit dispersed knowledge better than officials can, so markets correct errors that intervention only compounds.
The wrong road has been the road of government economic intervention.
There are, quite simply, too many laws, and for Hazlitt their sheer number is itself the harm, regardless of whether any single statute is wise. Defining law operationally as command rather than sentimental reform, he separates the rare rules that coordinate conduct, like traffic regulations, from the flood of prohibitions and compulsions that direct private choice. He reaches back to Herbert Spencer's 1854 attack on 'overlegislation' to show that even laissez-faire England groaned under statutes, then buries the reader in an inventory: state legislatures passing thousands of laws, agencies generating regulations that dwarf formal statutes, compliance costs Gene Taylor puts above sixty billion dollars a year. Citing Gustav Cassel's warning about cumulative control, he treats the torrent not as inconvenience but as a slide toward comprehensive direction of citizens by the state.
Every unnecessary law is itself bound to be pernicious.
'Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man' — Spencer made this formula the axis of his politics, and Hazlitt's chapter treats it as a powerful anti-coercive instinct yet a rule too vague for the weight it must carry. Equal freedom, he objects, defines liberty better than justice unless aggression, fraud, and legitimate competition are carefully distinguished; all practicable liberty is liberty under law. What Hazlitt prizes are Spencer's strikingly modern warnings: that democratic majorities use public agencies to shift costs onto minorities, that hidden taxation corrodes political responsibility, and that legislators mistake society for a manufactured object rather than an evolved order of voluntary cooperation — with only Auberon Herbert beside him against the collectivist tide.
The average legislator, equally with the average citizen, has no faith whatever in the beneficent working of social forces, notwithstanding the almost infinite illustrations of this beneficent working.
Hazlitt continues his inquiry into the proper limits of government by turning from Nozick to John Stuart Mill, a thinker raised in the laissez-faire tradition whose exceptions, he contends, quietly dismantle any stable boundary around the state. Mill sorts government's work into 'necessary' functions — courts, inheritance rules, coinage, weights and measures, contract enforcement — and 'optional' ones whose expediency stays open; but the optional list swells with compulsory education, protection of children and the insane, limits on working hours, poor relief, and ceilings on monopoly transport. Each concession looks humane, yet together they normalize discretion. The fatal move, for Hazlitt, is Mill's warrant for any task private persons could perform but will not — a formula loose enough to sanction nearly any coercion, and, he argues, a seed of the modern welfare state.
After having warned us that the state may carry out its delegated powers very badly, he assumes in particular instances that they will carry out these powers very well.
Keynes was, at bottom, an inflationist, and this compact essay works to convert that charge from insult into mechanism. Keynesian stimulus, Hazlitt argues, cannot rest on spending financed by taxation, since taxes cancel the purchasing power the spending was meant to add; what matters is the deficit. Once government spends beyond its revenue, the gap must be closed either by borrowing, which merely postpones contraction, or by creating new money, which means inflation. Every downturn thus becomes an argument for another dose of the same expedient, making Keynesianism less a theory of demand than a political technology for normalizing permanent fiscal imbalance. Reaching back to Roman debasement and John Law's paper schemes, Hazlitt warns that no inflation on record produced sound expansion, only depreciation, arbitrary redistribution and economic demoralization.
The lessons of inflation are soon forgotten.
Why did a regime that boasted of scientific planning keep buying grain from the capitalist countries it denounced? From that puzzle of chronic Soviet crop failures, Hazlitt reconstructs the socialist calculation argument in miniature. In a market the farmer need grasp none of the whole; profit and loss and a shifting structure of prices condense dispersed knowledge of scarcity, demand, weather, and transport into signals he can act on locally. Planners command rather than discover, and where they lean on foreign quotations or black-market indications they parasitically borrow the very mechanism they reject — otherwise they work in the dark, issuing quotas that harden into compulsory error. The core is explicitly Misesian: without genuine prices formed by the exchange of privately held resources, rational allocation is impossible. Marx's labor theory, he adds, survives on resentment, not analysis.
Without a set of previous real and recent market prices, without informed expectations, the bureaucracy would have to make 64 trillion blind guesses.
Handed ten stock objections to capitalism by a young defender of free enterprise, Hazlitt answers each in turn in this 1983 reply—on resource depletion, monopoly and discriminatory pricing, corporate power, access to capital, workplace injury, unequal wages and housing, and the charge that the system is simply inhuman. His recurring move is to accept the factual complaint while denying the inference: scarcity, error, and self-interest exist under every order, and government coercion usually worsens what it means to repair. Comparison, not utopia, is his standard—capitalism judged against feasible socialism, not against imagined abundance and perfect virtue. The title's diagnosis comes last: Americans live not under real capitalism but under what Mises called "sabotaged" capitalism, whose interventions breed unemployment and shortages that are then blamed on the market, generating demands for still more intervention.
The number of faults that have been alleged against capitalism are without limit.