Henry Hazlitt Quotes

Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.

I think democracies are prone to inflation because politicians will naturally spend [excessively] - they have the power to print money and will use money to get votes. If you look at inflation under the Roman Empire, with absolute rulers, they had much greater inflation, so we don't set the record. It happens over the long-term under any form of government.

The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.

The power to regulate the value of money does not involve a power to dilute the value of money by inflation, an absurd and self-serving rendering.

You have to change people’s minds to stop inflation.

A paper monetary standard means there are no restraints on the printing press or on federal deficits.

The threat of gold redeemability imposes a constant check and limit on inflationary issues of government paper. If the government can remove the threat, it can expand and inflate without cease. And so it begins to emit propaganda, trying to persuade the public not to use gold coins in their daily lives.

We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over.

Inflation is not caused by the actions of private citizens, but by the government: by an artificial expansion of the money supply required to support deficit spending. No private embezzlers or bank robbers in history have ever plundered people's savings on a scale comparable to the plunder perpetrated by the fiscal policies of statist governments.

Printing money is merely taxation in another form.

The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy.

If government manages to establish paper tickets or bank credit as money, as equivalent to gold grams or ounces, then the government, as dominant money-supplier, becomes free to create money costlessly and at will. As a result, this 'inflation' of the money supply destroys the value of the dollar or pound, drives up prices, cripples economic calculation, and hobbles and seriously damages the workings of the market economy.

Inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their effort on monetary policy.

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It is made by or stopped by the central bank.

Printing money creates inflation, which weakens an economy. Unfortunately, this kind of common-sense thinking never seems to penetrate academic circles.

If Congress wanted to intervene with the Federal Reserve, well, we created the Federal Reserve. We could uncreate it. But would you want Congress regulating the money supply? We'd have drowned in inflation, or gone bankrupt, decades ago.

Double-digit inflation is a terrible thing - and it got up to 14 or 15 percent on a monthly basis for a while, shortly after I became chairman of the Fed.

In reality there is no such thing as an inflation of prices, relatively to gold. There is such a thing as a depreciated paper currency.

Many emerging countries are facing the same issue of overheating and inflation because they have been vigorously expanding fiscal and monetary policy to counter the 2008 shock.

Who controls the issuance of money controls the government!

Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.

A good monetary policy follows inflationary expectations and not historical numbers.

He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.

Deficits do not in themselves produce inflation, nor does a balanced budget assure a stable price level.

The government, in my judgment, cannot create money; the government can give its note, like an individual, and the prospect of its being paid determines its value.