1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Because needs, supplies, and costs never stop shifting, any price a government fixes by law is soon an obsolete one — which is why Hazlitt's blunt answer to his title question, that the market should set prices, forecloses most schemes to raise, lower, or freeze them. No price stands alone; each is knotted to every other through joint production, substitution, and the competition of all goods for the consumer's dollar. Export supports for rubber or wheat must choke supply into quotas that breed bureaucracy and invite substitutes; wartime ceilings on necessities drain margins until controls metastasize across wages, imports, and inputs. Flexibility is the corrective, since a soaring price both rations scarce goods and summons new supply. He carries the case into monopoly and antitrust, doubting any court can price a competition that never existed.
Price control always reduces, unbalances, distorts, and discoordinates production.
A group of reformers, impatient with the patchwork of anti-poverty measures, proposed to abolish poverty at a stroke: guarantee every citizen an income sufficient to live "with dignity," worked for or not. Assembling his 1966 reply alongside the proposals of Robert Theobald's circle and the federal automation commission, Hazlitt treats the guaranteed income not as administrative tidying but as a new theory of rights—one enforced against producers and taxpayers. His counter is to translate "income" back into goods and services that someone must still produce. Fears that cybernation would soon erase jobs he dismisses as a recurring fallacy; static cost estimates he faults for assuming behavior would not change. Even Friedman's negative income tax, he warns, would swell under political pressure into an unconditional floor, severing reward from effort and eroding the surplus relief depends on.
Nearly all of them seem to share the belief, for example, that the growth of automation and "cybernation" is eliminating jobs so fast (or soon will be) that there soon just won't be jobs for even the most industrious.
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.
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.
A privately owned railroad cannot enrich its owner unless it carries the public and their goods, and that homely fact carries Hazlitt's thesis that property used in market production already serves a public purpose more faithfully than state ownership. Grounding the argument in Adam Smith and illustrating it with Henry Ford's reinvested profits, he shows that income saved and put to work in tractors, furnaces and housing benefits society as fully as any nationalization. From property he turns to saving, mounting a sustained attack on Keynes's 'cake' analogy: saving is not permanent nonconsumption but the precondition of capital formation, and a world where thrift was sin would grow steadily poorer. His austere conclusion is that the rich do most good not through extravagance or expropriation but by living simply and investing productively.
What the advocates of all expropriation schemes fail to realize is that property in private hands used for the production of goods and services for the market is already for all practical purposes public wealth.
Strip away the metaphysics, and a right is a legally protected sphere of action that imposes a matching duty on everyone else — this reciprocity is the spine of Hazlitt's 1964 essay in legal and political philosophy. From it he dissolves the fashionable quarrel between 'property rights' and 'human rights,' since both are claims of persons against persons, and rereads natural rights not as self-evident heavenly gifts but as ideal legal rights a just order ought to secure. His sharpest fire falls on 'pseudo-rights': Roosevelt's freedom from want and fear, or the United Nations' rights to paid holidays, which name desirable goods without saying who is obliged to supply them. Rights are inviolable, he concludes, not by mystical descent but because durable social peace depends on principled adherence to them.
Law and Right are correlative terms.
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.
'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.
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.
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.