“Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment. It is the proper sphere of government to create and enforce a framework of law that prohibits force and fraud. But it must refrain from specific economic interventions. Government’s main economic function is to encourage and preserve a free market. When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: “Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.” It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
“The ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector.”
― Henry Hazlitt
“When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”
― Henry Hazlitt
“This is perhaps as good a place as any to point out that what distinguishes many reformers from those who cannot accept their proposals is not their greater philanthropy, but their greater impatience. The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible. Among men of good will such an aim can be taken for granted. The real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
“..either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
First book I read on economics.I was listening to the Rush and he suggested it to all his audience.