The archive.

Reformers who chase an 'ideal money,' Hazlitt argues, divide into four camps, discretionary and rule-bound versions of both paper and gold, and the disorder of the mid-1970s is no accident but the fruit of the first. Discretionary fiat draws his sharpest fire: by tethering weak currencies to the dollar, Bretton Woods exported inflation across the world. Monetarism fares only marginally better, since a legislated money-growth rule would become a political football the instant recession loomed. Gold earns his defense not as nostalgia but because it cannot be conjured by statute; even so, he faults the classical fractional-reserve standard for breeding the cycle of boom and slump, and points instead toward enforceable private contracts payable in gold and a full, 100 percent reserve standard growing up beside state paper.

The great merit of gold is precisely that it is scarce; that its quantity is limited by nature; that it is costly to discover, to mine, and to process; and that it cannot be created by political fiat or caprice.

Traced back far enough, the monetary breakdown of the early 1970s begins not with Nixon but with the inflation of the First World War and the postwar myth of a gold 'shortage.' Hazlitt follows the wreckage forward through the gold-exchange standard of Genoa and Bretton Woods, where holding dollars and sterling as reserves multiplied paper claims on a shrinking gold base. Citing Jacques Rueff and John Exter, he dismisses Special Drawing Rights as politically minted paper and casts the IMF as a machine for pooling and disguising national inflation. His remedy is blunt: abolish SDRs, dismantle the Fund, halt Federal Reserve credit, balance the budget by cutting spending, and let a free gold market discover a workable conversion rate, assuming any government will abandon the ideology of perpetual inflation.

The IMF has served merely as a world inflation factory.

Friedman's proposal for a legislated rule fixing steady annual growth in the money stock is the target here, though Hazlitt takes care to salute the free-market economist behind it. Monetarists are right that money matters, he grants, but wrong to lean on a mechanical quantity theory: the value of money, like any good, is set by supply, demand, and subjective valuation, not by the arithmetic of MV = PT. He walks through the three stages of inflation, argues that a currency's quality and its holders' expectations move prices as surely as its quantity, and exposes 'velocity' as an after-the-fact excuse. The fatal defect, though, is political, hand the money supply to legislators and every recession becomes an argument for printing more.

So far as quantity is concerned, it is the expected future quantity of money, rather than the immediately existing quantity, that determines the exchange value of the monetary unit.

Where Hayek would let private banks issue competing paper currencies held to value by reputation alone, Hazlitt draws a firm line. Reviewing Choice in Currency and Denationalization of Money, he embraces the assault on legal-tender monopoly, repeal the tender laws, he agrees, and let citizens contract in gold, Swiss francs, or D-marks so that an inflating state punishes itself as users flee its notes. But American free banking, with its worthless Michigan banknotes and recurrent panics, teaches him to distrust irredeemable private paper and Hayek's vague commodity-basket 'ducat.' Sound private money, he counters, must be gold or silver certificates redeemable on demand, treated like warehouse receipts, with overissue prosecuted as fraud. The result he wants is not denationalized fiat but denationalized custody of a full-reserve metallic standard.

If it continued to inflate, its citizens would forsake its money for other currencies. Inflation would no longer pay.

No new supranational money is needed to steady world trade, so Hazlitt answers the industrialist Konosuke Matsushita, whose plea for a single global currency followed the yen-dollar swings and the collapse of the Smithsonian agreement. The world already had such a currency, in all but name, from the 1870s to 1914: the gold standard bound the major currencies not to one another but each to a fixed weight of gold, with no central issuer at all. Instability, Hazlitt insists, springs from divergent national inflation, not shifting balances of payments, and the IMF he brands the problem rather than the cure. His prescription is national responsibility, limit each currency's quantity, allow private gold coinage and certificates, restore 100 percent convertibility, perhaps behind a shared unit, the 'goldgram.'

The truth is that the world once did have a common currency, in everything but name. It had such a currency roughly from the last third of the nineteenth century to 1914. It was known as the gold standard.

Looking back from his seventieth birthday in 1964, Hazlitt counts himself a fortunate man, luckiest, he says, in his friends. The address moves from memoir into intellectual genealogy: a poverty-forced start at The Wall Street Journal, the discovery through Philip Wicksteed that economics is a rigorous science of human action, and the decisive debt to Benjamin Anderson, H. L. Mencken, and above all Ludwig von Mises. Yet the mood darkens into civilizational diagnosis. Separating genuine scientific and material progress from what he sees as decadence in art, morals, and politics, he reclaims the word 'liberal' for the defenders of limited government and free markets, then turns the reproach on his own side. Invoking Orwell's Winston Smith, he insists the duty to say two plus two equals four cannot be retired.

But the hard thing must be said that, collectively, we just haven't been good enough.

'Plan or no plan?' is the wrong question, Hazlitt argues in this 1962 Mont Pelerin Society address; the real one is whose plan. Consumers, workers and entrepreneurs plan ceaselessly, and a government's master design becomes meaningful only when it coerces different outcomes than free choice would yield. From this premise he dismantles two cases for planning: Galbraith's claim that markets make the wrong goods, and the growth planners' faith that merely announcing a four or five percent target can produce it. His sharpest reversal renames the debate, since Galbraith's 'private sector' is really the voluntary sector and his 'public sector' the coercive one. Real growth, Hazlitt maintains, follows from sound money, secure property and rewarded production, not from bureaucratic command dressed up as statistics.

The welfare state, as Bastiat put it with uncanny clairvoyance more than a century ago, is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.

Hostility to capitalism recurs, Hazlitt insists, not because its defenders have argued badly but because it springs from durable human impulses. Written for The Freeman in 1973, this polemic anatomizes five of them—compassion for hardship, impatience for cures, envy, short-run thinking, and the habit of measuring real institutions against imagined ideals—and traces each to a familiar intervention: envy sustains graduated taxation, impatience breeds minimum wages and relief. At the argument's core stands the coordinating work of prices, which signal scarcity and demand, and the calculation problem that leaves socialist planners unable to know what they produce at a profit and what at a loss. Because error is politically attractive and endlessly renewed, Hazlitt concludes, the case for economic freedom must be remade in every generation.

Nine-tenths of what is written today on economic questions is either an implied or explicit attack on capitalism.

Before poverty can be relieved it must be defined, and this 1971 essay argues that loose, relative definitions turn a real but bounded problem into an endlessly expanding political claim. To call the bottom fifth or third 'poor' confuses inequality with poverty and guarantees the problem can never be solved, since some group is always comparatively worse off. Hazlitt dissects the Johnson-era war on poverty's shifting thresholds, leaning on Rose D. Friedman's recalculation that, adjusting for family size and food-spending patterns, roughly halved the official poverty rate. Applied backward to 1929 or outward to India, today's American thresholds redescribe historic abundance as mass want. Poverty, he concludes, should be pegged to subsistence sufficient for health and strength, not to median income, lest relief outrun what work can earn and dependency become rational.

It is obvious, however, that all merely relative definitions of poverty make the problem insoluble.

Sincere reformers and demagogues alike have reached for the same lever—state action—to abolish poverty, and in Hazlitt's telling they have mostly made it worse. This 1971 Freeman polemic dismantles a catalogue of political remedies: redistribution and the guaranteed income, union privilege and featherbedding, minimum-wage laws, welfare finance, price and wage controls, and finally socialism itself. His method is to look past the visible transfer to the hidden cost—who pays, whose incentives collapse, what output is never produced. A statutory wage floor, he insists, cannot conjure the productivity it names; it only prices the least-skilled out of work. Socialism's deeper failure is the calculation problem: without genuine prices for capital goods, planners cannot rank alternatives except by imitating the market they reject. Durable relief, he concludes, rests on productivity, not command.

We cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him less.

Two kinds of foreign money confront each other in this 1970 pamphlet: private investment that works through ownership, prices, and profit-and-loss discipline, and government aid allocated by political fiat. Hazlitt defends the first as an intensified form of trade—capital arrives with management, technical skill, and the market test of possible loss, and it answers the "taking money out" complaint by first creating the wages, purchases, and productive capacity that make any profit possible. Aid embodies the opposite principle. He treats the Marshall Plan as an emergency wrongly made permanent and Point Four as the globalization of that error, crediting West Germany's recovery to Erhard's currency reform rather than to grants. Financed by taxes, borrowing, or inflation, aid diverts capital, empowers planners, and pauperizes the recipients who come to depend on it.

We cannot grow rich by giving our goods or our dollars away. We can only grow poorer.

Rereading Herbert Spencer's The Man Versus the State from the vantage of 1969, Hazlitt recovers a thinker usually dismissed as a laissez-faire relic and finds instead an uncanny prophet of the welfare state. Two surprises drive the essay: how precisely Spencer foresaw coming state encroachments, and how many supposedly modern interventions, from compulsory insurance and nationalized railways to rent control and state education, had already begun by 1884. The engine of decline Spencer named is political momentum, in which each intervention becomes precedent for the next and every failure is read not as a verdict against coercion but as a reason to expand it. Following Spencer, Hazlitt argues that redistribution rests on the hidden premise that earnings are held only by the community's permission. Spencer's coming slavery finds its completed form, he suggests, in Orwell's 1984.

Failure does not destroy faith in the agencies employed, but merely suggests more stringent use of such agencies or wider ramifications of them.