Henry Hazlitt Quotes

Free markets select for winning solutions.

The sharper the competition, the better it serves its social function to improve economic production.

When you have more competition, you have better products and lower prices.

The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise.

Profit margins are probably the most mean-reverting series in finance, and if profit margins do not mean-revert, then something has gone badly wrong with capitalism. If high profits do not attract competition, there is something wrong with the system and it is not functioning properly.

When you get down to the meat and potatoes of genuine capitalism, it is cutthroat, vicious competition, and the consumer always benefits in the end.

By competition the total amount of supply is increased, and by increase of the supply a competition in the sale ensues, and this enables the consumer to buy at lower rates. Of all human powers operating on the affairs of mankind, none is greater than that of competition.

Of all human powers operating on the affairs of mankind, none is greater than that of competition.

In the long run all producers are forced to use the most efficient methods or give place to others who do.

Competition's a good thing.

Competition drives growth in the end as opposed to monopolies.

My worldview says that competition is the consumer's best friend.

Sure, but competition is good for the user.

It is in vain for us to devise schemes by which competition can be put out of civilized life. Competition is the condition of life.

The market system makes all producers responsible to the consumer.

The consumers are merciless. They never buy in order to benefit a less efficient producer and to protect him against the consequences of his failure to manage better. They want to be served as well as possible. And the working of the capitalist system forces the entrepreneur to obey the orders issued by the consumers.

In a commodity business, it's very hard to be smarter than your dumbest competitor.

It is better to have a cat and mouse game where the cat has the upper hand than a cat and mouse game where the mice are ruling. Because the latter means that the market participants are given free range. That was actually the big misconception of our national hero Ronald Reagan, who always talked about the magic of the market.

Market competition is the only form of organization which can afford a large measure of freedom to the individual.

The State certainly played a decisive role. I also believe that it may have stemmed from the rivalry itself. Grow or die, devour or die. That's the one problem that I have to wrestle with. I have to wrestle with whether or not rivalry in the free market does not ultimately lead to concentration, corporatism, and finally totalitarianism.

Competition is the most promising means to achieve and secure prosperity. It alone enables people in their role of consumer to gain from economic progress. It ensures that all advantages which result from higher productivity may eventually be enjoyed.

It’s amazing that people don’t understand that the more the market is involved and the smaller the government, the lower the price, the better the distribution, and the higher the quality.

Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention

A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as crabgrass springs from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores... Capitalism is a government program.

The market is the best garden.