The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.Henry Hazlitt
Sunday, March 22, 2009
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Henry Hazlitt's knowledge of Karl Marx's argument can be summed up in one sentence: He didn't read him. I am now going to continue to write about Henry Hazlitt's knowledge of Karl Marx, even though it only takes one sentence to sum his knowledge up. Henry Hazlitt is part of the hierarchy of jealousy that pre-dates capitalism. His values do not include industry, competence, providence, and intelligence, but instead center around the concepts of status, fame, adulation, and glorifying the "pecking order". This is why he could only interpret Marx in only the narrowest of ways. For Hizlett, there are no social sciences. Society is not something to understand. Hazlitt is thus a hypocrite, because I'm sure he believes in "hard" science.
Can you back up any of these claims in regards to what Henry Hazlitt is a part of?
No more than he can back up the claim that Karl Marx = jealousy.
But he did write "thinking as a science", which means he believed in two things: 1) that hard science is something that should be respected and 2) that thoughtful action is the most important of understanding human activity, be it economics or politics. In short, cause-and-effect analysis is okay for physics and chemistry, but only morality and free will can properly describe human action! Describing such action through scientific analysis = jealousy.
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