In his book “Economics in One Lesson”, Henry Hazlitt writes
A certain amount of public spending is necessary to perform essential government functions. A certain amount of public works—of streets and roads and bridges and tunnels, of armories and navy yards, of buildings to house legislatures, police and fire departments—is necessary to supply essential public services. With such public works, necessary for their own sake, and defended on that ground alone, I am not here concerned. I am here concerned with public works considered as a means of “providing employment” or of adding wealth to the community that it would not otherwise have had.
This seems kinda statist to me. Do you agree or disagree with him? Are there any essential government functions? Is Hazlitt worth reading?
I would say that Hazlitt does fall under the category of statist, but his “Economics in One Lesson” is a very effective book in demolishing many government programs. He, like Mises and others, did not see a need for the total elimination of the state. But that alone hardly makes either of these individuals worthless. Both made contributions, Mises especially so.
In case you didn’t quite catch it, I am opposed to the argument that government that government is required to produce any good. Consequently, I must disagree with the quotation.
The Austrian school does not become radically libertarian until Rothbard. Mises said that he was confronted with greater libertarians than himself when he came to America, for the first time in his life.
Some are an-caps, some are minarchists. But, IMO, framing minarchists as “statits” just like they were commies doesn’t help the cause, it justs seeds strife among us.
You can’t really know what Hazlitt’s opinion is about government functions. He had a target audience in mind with that book and many of his other great books. This book wouldn’t have become such a classic if it didn’t have a few not to bad things to say about the government. It is actually what makes it a great starter. It gets the point across without being a turnoff to the free market skeptic.
From The Crisis of Democratic Theory (Edward A Purcell):
“Henry Hazlitt, a political commentator, suggested that both houses of Congress be abolished and replaced by a board of twelve men with special powers to handle the crisis [Great Depression]. Democracy, he maintained, was unintelligent and inefficient.”
Footnote references a Hazlett [sic] article “Without Benefit of Congress”, Scribner’s Magazine, July 1932. Anyone read this piece? I was not able to find anything with a few cursory searches.
Anyway, I have not read the entire piece, but that sounds pretty statist to me. I agree with him on democracy. But using crises to expand state power? Statist.
Kai, I recently heard that Hazlitt was an opponent of the New Deal during the Great Depression, and that Hazlitt, as a decent liberal, couldn’t possibly support such a thing.
But advocating the abolition of Congress appears to be a very radical move.
I’d agree with this and I think libertarians should focus more on crushing the most crippling attacks on freedom by non-minarchist statists.
I’ll probably take heat here for this, and although I’m pro-ancap, I do think minarchism will be “good enough” in terms of improving everyone’s standard of living relative to what we have today, so I don’t have a problem supporting C4L and such. Minarchism and ancap may disagree very fundamentally on some reasoning and perception of government, but minarchism will get you probably around 80-90% of the way to an ancap society; and (here comes the real lightning rod maybe) pushing for the last 10-20% of state deconstruction to reach “pure” ancap probably won’t be very significant anymore (in terms of quality of life and freedom) because the difference between the slavery we have now and “mostly ancap” is night and day.
I realize there is a huge fundamental difference in core belief between minarchism and ancap but practically speaking if you agree on 80-90% of the practical solutions as these two groups probably do, that’s a significant reason to overlook the disagreements on principle for now–at least until the non-minarchist statists have been fully discredited. If that’s possible…
If present day politicians were as statist as Hazlitt I’d participate in every single election.
What Hazlitt had to say is that if a government decide to build a railroad because it’s really needed to, say, join two important industrial areas, you can bite the bullet and think that, for all its waste and inefficiency, it’s something we truly need to connect point A and point B. But when the government decide to build a high speed railroad to benefit “the usual suspects” (large construction enterprises, workers’ unions, train manufacturers etc) and to appease local politicians that want to have something to show to their electors… then you have a problem, especially if there are cheaper and more effective alternatives to the high speed railroad (building or refurbishing local airports for example).
My feeling is that there are no “essential government functions”, nevertheless Hazlitt is one of the “giants”
of freedom and economic thought whom I strongly admire - I perceive him as a noble-minded minarchist.