The Age of Envy

Here are excerpts from a 1952 article that free-market journalist (you don’t hear those three words together very often anymore)  Henry Hazlitt wrote:

…Envy has been an attribute of human nature from the dawn of history. But it has always hitherto been regarded as a sin. Ovid thought it “the meanest of the vices.” The Bible calls it a “rottenness of the bones.” “From envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness,” says the Book of Common Prayer, “Good Lord deliver us.”

Yet today envy is glorified as a virtue. Politicians advocate measures, not because they will bring any material benefit to anyone, but on the ground that they may assuage the public envy which they themselves have helped to inflame. Hitler promised that nobody would be permitted to have an income of more than 1,000 marks a month or be allowed to live on the income from investments. Franklin D. Roosevelt once proposed a limit of $25,000 a year on incomes.

People sometimes become Socialists or Communists through a desire to abolish poverty, but when their ill-conceived schemes fail to bring this result, their feeling too often degenerates into mere hatred and envy of the rich. The success of Marx sprang from his contemptuous dismissal as “utopianism” of all peaceable or constructive attempts to relieve poverty, and from his naked appeal to hatred, envy, and class warfare against the well-to-do and successful.

The prevailing ideology today is a diluted form of Marxism, even on the part of many of those who think themselves anti-Marxist or anti-Communist. The emphasis of most “welfare state” proposals today is on hurting or impoverishing the rich rather than on helping or enriching the poor. Most of these measures surely accomplish the former, and usually the opposite of the latter. They level down, not up. [read more]

His words are as true today as they are back then.

Hazlitt wrote a book called Economics in One Lesson which is really good intro to economics. One of the better ones.