This essay is taken from Chapter 24 of Man vs. the Welfare State (1969).
From time to time over the last thirty years, after I have talked or written about some new restriction on human liberty in the economic field, some new attack on private enterprise, I have been asked in person or received a letter asking, “What can I do” – to fight the inflationist or socialist trend? Other writers or lecturers, I find, are often asked the same question.
The answer is seldom an easy one. For it depends on the circumstances and ability of the questioner – who may be a businessman, a housewife, a student, informed or not, intelligent or not, articulate or not. And the answer must vary with these presumed circumstances.
The general answer is easier than the particular answer. So here I want to write about the task now confronting all libertarians considered collectively.
This task has become tremendous, and seems to grow greater every day. A few nations that have already gone completely Communist, like Soviet Russia and its satellites, try, as a result of sad experience, to draw back a little from complete centralization, and experiment with one or two quasi-capitalist techniques; but the world’s prevailing drift – in more than 100 out of the 111 or so nations and mini-nations that are now members of the International Monetary Fund – is in the direction of increasing socialism and controls.
The task of the tiny minority that is trying to combat this socialistic drift seems nearly hopeless. The war must be fought on a thousand fronts, and the true libertarians are grossly outnumbered on practically all these fronts.
In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty; and the libertarians must combat them. But few of us individually have the time, energy, and special knowledge in more than a handful of subjects to be able to do this.
One of our gravest problems is that we find ourselves confronting the armies of bureaucrats who already control us, and who have a vested interest in keeping and expanding the controls they were hired to enforce.
Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993) was the author of Economics in One Lesson, the Failure of the “New Economics,” Man versus the Welfare State, Time Will Run Back, and many other books.
