Henry Hazlitt Quotes

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.

Wealth has no source but labor

The only way to create prosperity is to do more with less. In economic terms, an increase in productivity is an increase in the amount or quality of output generated for each unit of input. Jobs do not make society wealthier - productivity does.

The high wage begins down in the shop. If it is not created there it cannot get into pay envelopes. There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity for work.

What seems extraordinary is that the richest countries in the world, in terms of economic output, are the ones where we work hardest. You would have thought that the end of all this innovation, technological advancement, and financial wizardry should be to create less work, not more of it.

I cannot afford to waste my time making money.

In terms of productivity - that is, how much a worker produces in an hour - there's little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth.

Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.

It is hard to redistribute wealth of there is no productive class producing it.

Labor is the source of all wealth, and of all civilization; and since it is only through society that generally productive labor is possible, the whole product of labor, where there is a general obligation to work, belongs to society, - that is, to all its members, by equal right, to each according to his reasonable needs.

The distribution of wealth is just as important as its creation.

…no one should own more than a certain amount of land or receive more than a certain amount of income…

Opulent, civilized, and industrious nations, are greater consumers than poor ones, because they are infinitely greater producers.

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

Since the 1980s, we have given the rich a bigger slice of our pie in the belief that they would create more wealth, making the pie bigger than otherwise possible in the long run. The rich got the bigger slice of the pie all right, but they have actually reduced the pace at which the pie is growing.

We get paid for bringing value to the marketplace. It takes time,... but we get paid for the value, not the time.

The more men, generally speaking, will do for a Dollar when they make it, the more that Dollar will do for them when they spend it.

A worker's capital is inexhaustible, incapable of being stolen, and bound to pay him a generous dividend all the time.

All wages are based primarily on productive power. Anything else would be charity.

Man acquires wealth in proportion as he puts his labor to better account.

Socialism’s cultural contradiction is that it is parasitic on capitalism, which must produce the wealth that socialism redistributes — until the engine of wealth creation, battered by socialism’s redistributive agenda, sputters.

They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.

[The] zero-sum caricature [applies] much more accurately to socialism, which stifles the creation of new wealth and thus fosters a dog-eat-dog struggle over existing material resources.

But I beg you to observe that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of work, and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins; (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, because you are king of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's work.