Growing up in America I believed, as with many. that the “forgotten man” is the when whom politicians always speaking about helping. The “man” Teddy Kennedy also exalts as the “man” he seeks to help with an increase in the minimum wage, through health care, college tuition grants, and other government aid programs. That is the “forgotten man” I was told. The man the politician always seeks to help and casts in his ads. He is “forgotten” because, we are told, he is neglected. The rich are getting richer, we are told, and the “forgotten man” is resigned to a life of destitution.

There are people who fit that description and who genuinely need our help. We should reach to them and provide a hand, I do and so do most Americans; whom are the most generous people in measurements of dollars donated.

But where does that term “the forgotten man” originate from? It is quite ironic. I came across the answer in Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics In One Lesson.” Hazlitt wrote:

In the course of our study, also, we have rediscovered an old friend. He is the Forgotten Man of William Graham Sumner. The reader will remember that in Sumner’s essay, which appeared in 1883:

As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for ... .. What I want to do is to look up C.... I call him the Forgotten Man.... He is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist, and I hope to show you before I get through that he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid upon him.

It is a historic irony that when this phrase, the Forgotten Man, was revived in the 1930s, it was applied, not to C, but to X; and C, who was then being asked to support still more Xs, was more completely forgotten than ever. It is C, the Forgotten Man, who is always called upon to stanch the politician’s bleeding heart by paying for his vicarious generosity.

Read the entire essay by Sumner.

When will the world’s politicians remember the man they have burdened with their spending? When will Forgotten Man rise up and demand not to be made into a chess piece for political goals any longer? Soon? I hope.

“It is easy to be conspicuously ‘compassionate’ if others are being forced to pay the cost.” Murray N. Rothbard.