Trade creates wealth. Profits direct businesses toward activities that increase wealth. Competition increases efficiency and innovation. Taxation and regulation discourage production and destroy wealth . Political decision-making favors plunder over production.
Central planning wastes resources and retards economic progress.
He went on to say that nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that work harm in the world today are the result of ignoring this lesson. While Hazlitt's Lesson is not exactly a separate economic principle, it is a form of mental discipline that must be exercised when constructing or analyzing policy. The Gwartney and Stroup book provides excellent examples of how rent control laws destroy urban housing, protective tariffs and quotas harm American consumers and workers, and jobs programs fail to create a single job overall. Hazlitt's book, Economics in One Lesson, is still one of the best examples of the economic way of thinking put into practice. More often than not, the harm of these policies falls not only on people who were never considered at the time, but on the supposed beneficiaries of the programs.