Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise.
They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to buy houses that they cannot really afford. They tend eventually to bring about an over-supply of houses. They temporarily over stimulate building, raise the cost of building for everybody. May mislead the building industry into an eventually over expansion.
In brief, in the long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment. —Henry Hazlitt
While rising prices are likely to reflect changes in supply and demand, people ignorant of economics may attribute price rises to greed. —Thomas Sowell
While rising prices are likely to reflect changes in supply and demand, people ignorant of economics may attribute price rises to greed. —Thomas Sowell
Real wages come out of production, not out of government decrees. The best way to raise wages, therefore, is to raise marginal labor productivity.
The more the individual worker produces, the more he increases the wealth of the whole community. The more he produces, the more his services are worth to consumers, and hence to employers. And the more he is worth to employers, the more he will be paid. —Henry Hazlitt
Inflation distorts the structure of production. It leads to the overexpansion of some industries at the expense of others. This involves a misapplication and waste of capital.
Yet the ardor for inflation never dies. It would almost seem as if no country is capable of profiting from the experience of another and no generation of learning from the sufferings of its forebears.
For it is the nature of inflation to give birth to a thousand illusions. —Henry Hazlitt
For every dollar that the government spends on public works one less dollar was spent by the taxpayers to meet their own wants and for every public job created one private job was destroyed. —Henry Hazlitt
Printing money in place of real savings can create the illusion of more wealth. Just as the addition of water can create the illusion of more milk. —Henry Hazlitt
Printing money in place of real savings can create the illusion of more wealth. Just as the addition of water can create the illusion of more milk. —Henry Hazlitt
The most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.
This is necessarily a slow affair, a process which extends not over a few years but perhaps over one or two generations.
The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives.
This means, among other things, that EVEN a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.
