Politics & Power Quote by Henry Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line is a velvet-gloved warning: treat money like a live wire and keep elected hands off it. The punch comes from how calmly it smuggles in a harsh anthropology. Politicians, in this view, are not merely fallible; they are structurally tempted to cheat. Give them discretion over “quantity or quality” and they will discover that inflation, debasement, and gimmicky credit are the easiest taxes to raise because they look like prosperity in the short run. The phrase “least possible power” is doing heavy lifting: it doesn’t argue that politicians are uniquely evil, only that the incentives of office reward short-term sweetness over long-term stability.

The subtext is a critique of modern governance as performance. A “sound monetary system” isn’t just technical plumbing; it’s a constitutional restraint, a way of making certain promises costly to break. Hazlitt is asking for money to be less like policy and more like a rule: predictable, boring, hard to manipulate for electoral advantage. That’s why he pairs “quantity” (how much money exists) with “quality” (what backs it, how credible it is). He’s aiming at both printing and the softer forms of degradation: political pressure on central banks, financing deficits indirectly, dressing up debasement as stimulus.

Context matters: Hazlitt wrote in the shadow of the Great Depression, the New Deal’s expansion of state power, wartime finance, and the mid-century ascent of managed currency. Against that backdrop, the quote reads less like a libertarian slogan than a diagnosis of a recurring drama: when money becomes a campaign tool, reality sends the bill later, with interest.