The archive.

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.

"Optimum" sounds like a clear concept and is nothing of the sort. Responding as a discussant to Abram Bergson and Jan Tinbergen, Morgenstern presses two objections that unsettle the confident vocabulary of welfare planning. First, productivity, so intelligible for physical output, becomes one of the weakest ideas in economics once services dominate national income, leaving comparisons across systems on shakier ground than they claim. Second, an optimum invoked rhetorically is not an optimum proven to exist, and recent theory had produced cases where none does. From there he argues that society cannot in principle be fully formalized, that imposed equality raises the unanswered question of what keeps equal incomes equal, and that identical physical circumstances can sustain rival stable orders. Choosing among them, he concludes, is an ethical and political act, not a scientific result.

There is no scientific reason why one system should be preferred over the other.

Persistent payments imbalance, when it will not soon correct itself, is best met by realigning the exchange rate rather than by controls, reserve losses, borrowing, inflation, or deflation — so run these two Horowitz Lectures. Machlup distrusts the notion of a single equilibrium rate, since money, wages, productivity, and capital flows shift too continually, and prefers to speak of alignment and disalignment. The first lecture reduces the choice to its essentials: adjust supply and demand to the rate, or adjust the rate to supply and demand, counting deflation's unemployment and inflation's distortions as the real costs. The second is political economy, explaining why governments delay until a small early move becomes a wrenching late one, and defending crawling pegs, wider bands, and temporary floating.

Currency speculation is a function of disaligned exchange rates that are expected to undergo adjustment by large jumps.

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.

Two classic claims for socialism — that it produces more efficiently and distributes more justly — organize this pointed commentary, in which Machlup largely concedes Bergson's empirical comparison of Soviet and Western performance in order to train his fire on Tinbergen's case for income equalization. Egalitarian welfare economics, he argues, cannot smuggle equality in as a technical result: it rests on ethical postulates that can be assented to but never proved, on an implausible welfare thermometer of interpersonal utility, and on a neglect of incentives, envy doing much of the work solidarity is supposed to do. Push Tinbergen's logic to the globe, Machlup adds, and it demands a redistribution between rich and poor nations no wealthy electorate would ratify. His closing witness is Stalin, quoted condemning wage-leveling.

In a worldwide referendum I would expect a majority to vote for radical redistribution, so that the poor can share the wealth with the rich—with the result that all would be equally poor.

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.

Economic Man — homo oeconomicus — stood accused of materialism, greed, and a degraded picture of humanity, and Machlup treats that hostility as the real subject of inquiry. Sampling the denunciations of Barton, the Historical School, Carey, and Ruskin, he grants that economists often described the construct badly, equating wealth with material goods and maximization with selfishness. But poor descriptions of a model do not refute the need for one. Reconstructing the methodological quarrel among Mill, Senior, Bagehot, Cairnes, and Wicksteed, he argues that maximization is not egoism and that Economic Man is no portrait of the whole person but a premise within a hypothetico-deductive system — a homunculus, not a man, built to explain how agents react when prices, incomes, and costs change.

The ‘bogey’ to whom this essay will be devoted is Economic Man.

Wartime regulation is often pictured as government imposing discipline on business. In this essay, Murray N. Rothbard reverses that picture: industrial leaders helped design and administer controls that, he argues, protected profits and curtailed competition. Steel price agreements, food licensing, and railroad guarantees make his case concrete, exposing the coercive powers behind ostensibly voluntary cooperation. His central concern is what survived demobilization—not simply agencies, but personnel, techniques, and an ideal of government-backed industrial coordination. Tracing these connections into Hoover’s associationism and the New Deal, Rothbard challenges the distinction between public planning and private privilege. The essay offers readers a pointed account of how emergency economic arrangements can become models for peacetime policy, and why businesses might welcome rather than resist federal intervention.

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.

Grant, for the sake of argument, that pollution is grave: the real question, Sennholz proposes, is whether its cause is private enterprise or political control. Answering the charge that pollution proves the failure of capitalism, he reverses the accusation—the state itself is the chief polluter, through public dumps, incinerators, sewer authorities, and navigable waters treated as common property, with Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River as exhibits. Urban smog he traces not to the automobile, which he defends as a genuine gain of enterprise, but to zoning, subsidized roads priced as free goods, and transit strangled by regulation. His deeper move recasts pollution as a failure of property-right enforcement rather than of property itself: where law exempts owners from the costs they impose, harm follows. The remedy is not a new bureaucracy but tort liability, damages, and injunctions—an early manifesto of free-market environmentalism.

As government is the prime polluter of our environment we must call on government to cease and desist.