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Man vs. The Welfare State Paperback – April 15, 2015

by Henry Hazlitt (Author)
4.6 out of 5 stars 95 ratings
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In this 1969 work, Henry Hazlitt explains why politicians who promise salvation through government are dangerous. Among the essays: Instant Utopia Salvation Through Government Spending "We Owe It To Ourselves" Consequences of Dollar Debasement The High Cost of Wage Hikes Price Controls More on Price Controls Who Protects the Consumer? Famines Are Government-Made Runaway Relief and Social Insecurity Income Without Work Fallacies of the Negative Income Tax Can We Guarantee Jobs? Soaking the Rich Soaking the Corporations Government Planning vs. Economic Growth Government As Prosperity-Maker Uruguay: Welfare State Gone Wild Inflation Is Worldwide The Case for the Gold Standard The Fallacy of Foreign Aid Government Unlimited From Spencer's 1884 to Orwell's 1984 The Task Confronting Libertarians What We Can Do About It
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  1. Print length
    236 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    April 15, 2015
  4. Dimensions
    6 x 0.54 x 9 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1610160177
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1610160179
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ludwig von Mises Institute
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 15, 2015
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 236 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1610160177
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1610160179
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.7 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.54 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 out of 5 stars 95 ratings

About the author

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Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt

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Henry Stuart Hazlitt (November 28, 1894 – July 9, 1993) was an American journalist who wrote about business and economics for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The American Mercury, Newsweek, and The New York Times. He is widely cited in both libertarian and conservative circles.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Mises Institute (Released by the Mises Institute) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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4.6 out of 5 stars
95 global ratings

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Customers find the book provides general knowledge of economics and is a great read. One customer notes it's a must-read for those with libertarian leanings.

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7 customers mention "Knowledge level"7 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the knowledge level of the book, with several noting it provides general economic insights, and one customer highlighting the author's expertise as a pre-eminent economic columnist of his generation.

"...It has strong historical cases and sound economic reasoning...." Read more

"This is a thoughtful and complex look at economics, and that is not something you can say about most economics books...." Read more

"Henry Hazlitt is one of the best in writing clear, concise lessons on economics. His logic is easy to follow, much like Frederic Bastiat...." Read more

"Hazlitt is a great writer of economics. He makes the subject interesting. To understand our world we need an understanding of economics...." Read more

6 customers mention "Readability"6 positive0 negative

Customers find the book readable, with one noting it's a must-read for those with libertarian leanings.

"...This is however a must read for everyone with libertarian leanings...." Read more

"...A great read!" Read more

"Great book very informative and thought provoking." Read more

"Essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand what the American republic was intended to be, but no longer is." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Rami
    5.0 out of 5 stars Welfare State the Ultimate Destroyer
    Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2018
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Powerful testimony against the welfare state. It has strong historical cases and sound economic reasoning. Welfare state is a very dangerous slippery slope into the maddness of full socialism.

    Hazlitt drops the ball only once when he avoids the anarchist interpretation of the fundamental nature of state by very weak reasoning.

    This is however a must read for everyone with libertarian leanings. Hazlitt belongs to the era of social scientists where economists were much more than just mere bean counters we have today.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Anonymous
    5.0 out of 5 stars A great read!
    Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2016
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    This is a thoughtful and complex look at economics, and that is not something you can say about most economics books. There are points/perspectives that I disagree with, however the book provides much food for thought. A great read!
    One person found this helpful
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  • Kindle Customer
    4.0 out of 5 stars Welfare State Illusions
    Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2016
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    As he watched Roosevelt’s New Deal bear fruit in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society (whereby a tenfold growth in government activities took place), Henry Hazlitt protested the mushrooming power and size of the federal government and its necessarily dictatorial “Planned Economy,” setting forth his objections in Man vs. the Welfare State (New Rachelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, c. 1969). He noted that FDR’s generation of politicians had promised not only to “bring perpetual full employment, prosperity, and ‘economic growth,’ but solve the age-old problem of poverty overnight. And the end results not merely that accomplishment has fallen far short of promises, but that the attempt to fulfill the promises has brought an enormous increase in government spending, an enormous increase in the burden of taxes, chronic, deficits, chronic inflation, ‘Social Security’ has brought an ominous increase in social insecurity” (#92).
    Basically Hazlitt tries to help the reader understand the short-sightedness of welfare state economics. There simply cannot be “salvation through government spending” because the deficit spending involved is no better than “creating money out of thin air.” It wrongly equates income (or money) with goods and services, which are the only true measure of a nation’s wealth. Nor can we evade the ominous consequences of indebtedness by arguing (as did Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith and kindred “liberal” economists) that “we owe it to ourselves.” Unfortunately, as David Hume observed two centuries earlier, such rationalizations regarding “contracting debt will almost infallibly be abused in every government.” And rather than repay the debt governments inflate (and thus debase) the currency—effectively repudiating it! Putting “it bluntly, the government’s creditors have been swindled” (#254).
    Swindlers of all sorts succeed by subtly misleading their victims, and “the welfare state can arise and persist only be cultivating and living on a set of economic delusions in the minds of the voters” (#527). Among these delusions are the worth of minimum wage laws, price controls, consumer protection regulations, relief programs, Social Security, guaranteed annual income, guaranteed jobs, the negative income tax, and various “soak the rich” endeavors. The swindlers assert, through the mouths of prominent politicians, that “social justice” demands those who can pay for the welfare state be forced to do so. Listening to such rhetoric, almost all voters assume the “rich” are people much richer than they—only later to they awaken to the fact that they themselves are the “rich” who must pay the bills! Admitting they will rob Peter to pay Paul, they imagine they are only depriving the “rich” Peter of his property.
    President Lyndon Johnson once said: “‘We are going to try to take all of the money that we think is unnecessarily being spent and take it from the “haves” and give it to the “have nots” that need it so much’” (#3022). The main mechanism for doing this is the progressive income tax, established by American Progressives in the 16th Amendment a century ago. Those promoting it fully understood its baleful economic prospects, but they wanted to use it for social transformation. “In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels frankly proposed ‘a heavy progressive or graduated income tax’ as an instrument by which ‘the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State,’ and to a make ‘despotic inroads on the right of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production’” (#1537).
    In fact, “the government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from someone else, and most all welfare state policies illustrate “the shrewd observation of the French economist, Bastiat, more than a century ago: “‘The State is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live a the expense of everybody else’” (#1028). Doing so inevitably leads to disasters such as was evident half-a-century ago in Uruguay, which embraced “democratic socialism” a century ago or in Venezuela today. The cost of living balloons and the GNP declines. Ultimately, the welfare state cannot but destroy the economy!
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Paul Jones
    5.0 out of 5 stars Common Sense
    Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2013
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Henry Hazlitt is one of the best in writing clear, concise lessons on economics. His logic is easy to follow, much like Frederic Bastiat. I would recommend him to anyone who is curious about economics and how our governments are run. When you realize he is right you get afraid for the future. Very afraid.
    6 people found this helpful
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  • Kindle Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
    Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2014
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    Hazlitt is a great writer of economics. He makes the subject interesting. To understand our world we need an understanding of economics. Henry Hazlitt's writing is a great place to start.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • James M. Hammond
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
    Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2014
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    This book is really about Socialism which is like a cancer. This book carefully demonstrates how it saps the peoples strength until their souls slowly die. It diverts attention from the important things in life by focussing on the baser weaknesses of humans such as jealousy of others' financial success. Socialism germinated in the 19th Century like Marxism as a cure-all for the excesses of Capitalism at that time and this book explains how it applies to our contemporary world. I highly recommend it for people who want to see through the current political fog which obscures our present National dilemma created by the "nanny state".
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Daniel
    4.0 out of 5 stars Great book to understand our current economic problems
    Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2012
    Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
    The only reason I did not give this 5 stars is because this book was written decades ago and the numbers used are from that time frame which can get slightly boring. Other than that, this book is an easy read and very informative especially if you want to understand economic problems in the US and gain a general knowledge of economics. This book might be old but if you didn't know when it was published you would think it was written around the economic crash of 2008. Also, this is not as boring as one might expect from a book dealing with economics. You might find yourself saying "ohhhhhh, so thats why we have these economic problems." This book was definitely ahead of its time.
    10 people found this helpful
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  • Samuel
    5.0 out of 5 stars this is a good expose' of how people are trapped by the propaganda ...
    Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2018
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    this is a good expose' of how people are trapped by the propaganda of the welfare state. when you trap more non-producers than producers you are headed for some type of societal collapse and eventual elected dictatorship. Lots of food for thought concerning our current situation. We dodged a bullet this last election.
    2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • André L. C.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente! Obrigatório!
    Reviewed in Brazil on August 16, 2017
    Format: KindleVerified Purchase
    É possível sobreviver a social democracia?
    Quais são os problemas criados e perpetuados por um sistema assistencialista?
    Quais são as soluções possíveis para se livrar deste mal?
    Estas e outras respostas são dadas de maneira clara e irrefutáveis.
    Recomendo!
    Report
  • Julian B.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Sehr gutes Buch!
    Reviewed in Germany on September 6, 2020
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Einige sehr interessante Aspekte. Jedoch ist der Anfang des Buches sehr vereinfacht geschrieben und eher für „Einsteiger“ der Österreichischen Schule.
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  • Jaron
    5.0 out of 5 stars Truth
    Reviewed in Germany on June 11, 2019
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    Truth
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