Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 88 of Art Carden’s and Ilia Murtazasvili’s paper “W.H. Hutt: An Economist for the Twenty-First Century,” which is a chapter in the 2026 book Unsung Heroes of the Market: The 24 Underrated Economists You Need to Know – a volume edited by Robert Whaples, Christopher Coyne, Gregory Robson, and Diana Thomas [original emphasis; footnote deleted]:

His [Hutt’s] criticisms of strike-threats were grounded in his conviction that it was impossible to transfer wealth and income from capitalists as a class to workers as a class for several reasons. First, workers who saved and invested were themselves capitalists. Second, any gains workers enjoyed from the strike-threat system came at the expense of other workers who were shut out of the market and consumers who were paying higher prices. Throughout [Hutt’s 1973 book] The Strike-Threat System, he argued that the system’s apologists failed to answer the important ethical question about why one class (investors) should be expropriated for the benefit of another class (workers), noting further that “the easy assumption that investors are rich and workers poor is rather dubious today.” With so many Americans owning the means of production through pension funds and retirement accounts, it is even less clear in the twenty-first century.

DBx: Indeed so.

W.H. Hutt (1899-1988) was one of the finest economists – and most consistent advocates of liberalism – of the past 100 years. His work, unfortunately, is not well known. Also unfortunately, over the past few years Hutt has become the target of libelous accusations issued by pseudo-scholars who are hell-bent on falsely portraying Hutt as an illiberal racist in order to have a straw man to destroy in their dogmatic war against the liberal market order.