2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
There are, for Hazlitt in this 1985 primer, only two ways to organize economic life — voluntary exchange or political command — and mixed systems drift toward coercion unless the market principle is consciously defended. To clear the ground he rehabilitates the 'profit motive,' recasting it as the near-universal drive of families to preserve and better their condition, then builds outward through the division of labor to a self-correcting order in which prices and losses discipline error and capital equips labor with sharper tools. Half the essay is polemic: against Marx's labor theory of value, which omits risk, management, and entrepreneurial judgment, and against the interventionist faith that price ceilings, rent controls, and minimum wages can legislate prosperity. Each such remedy, he shows, misfires into shortage, unemployment, or inflation.
It was not consciously planned by anybody. It evolved.