after a quick Google search – the last two (“Socialism and Famine” and “Undo the IMF System”) can both be found here: http://www.moremagazines.net/

We got them for you! Here you go: http://unrforliberty.com/2010/10/missing-henry-hazlitt%E2%80%99s-editorials-recovered-for-mises-institute.html

I don’t know if you only have scans of the others, but just as a proof of concept, I converted the Keynsian one to text. Took 25 minutes, but substantial portions of that were playing around. Did the Government Lending one next. That took 22 minutes because my OCR program kept crashing.

–
Arthur F. Burns, now chairman of
the Council of Economic Advisers.
is one of the country’s outstanding
statisticians. Yet there is in his implied economic philosophy much to
cause misgivings.

He has, it is true, several times
criticized “Keynesian thinking” (see
The Frontiers of Economic
Knowledge.” Princeton University Press). Yet in this
very criticism he seems to
me to accept the four
principal assumptions, so
far as practical policy is
concemed, of Keynesian
doctrine: (1) That “full
employment” is the paramount economic goal; (2)
that a private competitive
economy, left to itself, tends to generate from mysterious inner forces a
perpetual cycle of boom and bust;
(3) that it is the “responsibility” of
govemment—tacitly assumed to be
wise, disinterested, and benevolent-
to pursue “contracyclical” policies to
eliminate or mitigate these otherwise
inherent booms and slumps; and (4)
that the basic contracyclical policy is
deficit spending. Let us look at these
assumptions more closely.

I—In “The Frontiers of Economic
Knowledge,” Dr. Burns declares:
“The principal practical problem of
our own generation is the maintenance of employment, and it has now
become—as it long should have been-
the principal problem of economic
theory. This transformation of economic theory is due in large part
to the writings of john Maynard
Keynes.” This surely sums up present
fashionable doctrine. But is it true?
The principal practical economic
problem of our own, as of preceding
generations, is the creation of the
maximum material welfare for the
great body of the people. This can be
mainly achieved through maximizing
the production and consumption of
the right things (including leisure).
Maintaining employment is, of course,
one of the necessary means to this
end. But to erect _it into the “principal”
end itself is a hopeless confusi And
as I wrote in “Economics in One Lesson” eight years ago: “Nothing is
easier to achieve than full mploy-
ment, once it is. . .taken as in
itself. Hitler provided full employment with a huge armament program.
The war provided full employment
for every nation involved.” The slave-
labor camps in Russia today provide
full employment.

2-Now in a speech in Detroit an
couple of weeks ago—on Oct. 18-
Dr. Burns made what seems to me
another disturbing statement. “Since our system of
free and competitive enterprise is on trial,” he said,
“the government cannot
stand aloof from the private
economy but must be ready
to take vigorous steps to
help maintain a stable prosperity.” In the last two centuries the system of free
and competitive enterprise
has shown itself to be the most productive ever known to man. In what
sense is it still “on trial”—except in
the sense in which every human institution and every human being may
be said to be on trial? Is it more on
trial than socialism? Or state planning?
Or Dr. Burns’ “beloved acyclical
policy”? The tacit assumptions in Dr.
Burns’ statement are not only that
a free and competitive private econ-
omy cannot be trusted to be reason-
ably stable, but that the government
—i.e., the politicians in power—can be
trusted to know and to do exactly
what is needed to keep it stable.
Both assumptions are debatable.

3—“Contracyclical policies” is a
fancy and flattering phrase, but I
cannot recall any example, historical
or contemporary, of their consistently
intelligent, disinterested, and successful application. On the contrary, the
record of nearly every govemrnent
in the world, in our time, is one of
recurrent or continuous monetary inflation. It is to this monetary inflation
that the apparent “successes” of fullemployment policies are due.

4—Dr. Burns seems at one with
the Keynesians, in spite of his reservations, in regarding deficit financ-
ing as one of the chief “weapons”
of “contracyclical policy.” But this
modern superstition, if persisted in,
must lead toward economic and political catastrophe. Largely as a re-
sult of its dominance, we have had
budget deficits for 22 out of
last 25 years; and the end of the
deficit orgy is not in sight.

–
Our direct official govemment debt
is $277 billion. This in itself
should be colossal enough to disturb
any citizen who studies its implications. But the Hoover commission, in
its report of March 13 on Federal
lending agencies, found, in addition,
that government loans, guarantees. insurance, and contingent liabilities, created through
more than a hundred different Federal agencies, totaled $244 billion.

The commission’s report
made various suggestions
for reducing the government’s proliferating lending
agencies and putting others
more nearly on a business
basis. Yet moderate as its
suggestions were, five of the twelve
commission members thought they
went too far.

The majority recommendations
were based in part on a report of 257
pages prepared by a group headed
by Paul Grady, a partner of Price,
Waterhouse & Co. This task-force report was not made public until later.
It is hard to see how any member of
the commission could have read it and
still remained blind to the mischief
and danger of govemment lending
to private business.

Whoever was principally responsible for drafting the task-force report
not only knew the principles of accounting, but had a firm grasp of both
economic and political principles and
a gift for pithy, aphoristic statement.
The first 25 pages are a model of what
such a report should be. It would be a
tragedy if it should gather dust while
more billions of the taxpayers’ mdney
are recklessly “loaned” away.

The temptation to quote from this
report is limited only by space. A few
excerpts may indicate its qua1ity:

“It sometimes happens that a program accomplishes its original objec-
tives, and then continues to function
ostensibly for the same but actually
for other purposes.” (This might be
said of much more Man lending programs; it is a sort of universal bureaucratic law.) “REA is an example . . .
Although more than 90 per cent of
the nation’s farms are electrified, the
sponsors of the REA program foresee
no end to the need for ever increasing
amounts of govemment loans for rural
electrification.” The report goes on: to
cite the RFC and other examples.
“Ever since the depression of the
early 1930s, we have made virtually
fetish of financial security for the individual, and by our successive governmental efforts to enhance it, we have
loaded more and more of the inherent
financial risks of our economic life on the Federal
Treasury. . . No economic
system is free from risks of
loss. . . The savings of our
people must stand the losses
of our enterprises if there
are losses. There is no way
around this, no matter how
remote we are able to make
the settlement appear . . .

“We may not like to ac-
knowledge it, but it is an essential
truth that many in our society, though
they may honestly wish to try, are not
capable of being successful businessmen, successful farmers, or even successful home owners. The failures of
such people may be personal misfortunes but there seems little justification for assessing the. taxpayers to
cover their losses . . .

“It is not possible for the government to assist one competitor without placing handicaps in the path
of another . . .

“Human nature and politics being
what they are, occasional windfall
profits are virtually an inevitable accompaniment of govemment lending.
Subsidies in one form or another are
an essential characteristic of govemment lending and a windfall profit is
only a subsidy grown up . . .

“Government lending programs and
government guarantee programs have
a fatal attraction politically. They can
be used handily to bestow favor on
particular groups and persons . . . Because it is attractive politically, gov-
ernment lending grows and grows.
Each successive national administration offers more than the last lest there
appear to be retrogression.”

Finally, the task force quotes from
the prophetic statement of the first
Hoover commission in 1949: “Direct
lending by the government to persons
or enterprises opens up dangerous
possibilities of waste and favoritism . . .
It invites political and private pressure, or even corruption.”