The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt by Hans F. Sennholz

Author:Hans F. Sennholz [Hans F. Sennholz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-61016-124-4
Publisher: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.
Published: 1993-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

“The Nation” Cannot Afford It

This disapproval and coercion may rest on several grounds. Nearly all “austerity” programs stem from the belief, not that the person who wants to make a “luxury” expenditure cannot afford it, but that “the nation” cannot afford it. This involves the assumption that, if I set up a bowling alley or patronize one, I am somehow depriving my fellow citizens of more necessary goods or services. This would be true only on the assumption that the proper thing to do is to tax my so-called surplus income away from me and turn it over to others in the form of money, goods, or services. But if I am allowed to keep my “surplus” income, and am forbidden to spend it on bowling alleys or on imported wine and cheese, I will spend it on something else that is not forbidden. Thus when the British austerity program after World War II prevented an Englishman from consuming imported luxuries, on the ground that “the nation” could not afford the “foreign exchange” or the “unfavorable balance of payments,” officials were shocked to find that the money was being squandered on football pools or dog races. And there is no reason to suppose, in any case, that the “dollar shortage” or the “unfavorable balance of payments” was helped in the least. The austerity program, insofar as it was not enforced by higher income taxes, probably cut down potential exports as much as it did potential imports; and insofar as it was enforced by higher income taxes, it discouraged exports by restricting and discouraging production.

But we come now to the specific Galbraith thesis, growing out of the agelong bureaucratic suspicion of luxury spending, that consumers generally do not know how to spend the income they have earned; that they buy whatever advertisers tell them to buy; that consumers are, in short, boobs and suckers, chronically wasting their money on trivialities, if not on absolute junk. The bulk of consumers also, if left to themselves, show atrocious taste, and crave cerise automobiles with ridiculous tailfins.

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