Market Shorts – Henry Hazlitt’s Long-Term Economic Thinking

Source: American Spectator

“Henry Hazlitt is considered to be one of the best financial journalists of the 20th century. ‘He was a giant in financial journalism,’ as Jim Grant pointed out in his 2014 Mises Institute lecture entitled ‘Hazlitt, My Hero.’ Aside from his journalism, Hazlitt was a prolific writer who summed-up economics in ‘one lesson’ in 1946. Economics in One Lesson was based, in part, on Frederic Bastiat’s essay, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, and delves into the importance of aspects of the economy that are never spoken about, because they never happen. Hazlitt goes one step further, summing up economics not simply as a series of transactions with hidden implications, but in terms of long-term effects outliving the short-term effects of every economic principle or policy….In his book, The Foundations of Morality, Hazlitt defines morality as ‘not the subordination of the ‘individual’ to ‘society,’ but the subordination of immediate objectives to long-term ones.’ As in his understanding of economics, he realized that the long-term interests of the individual would serve the long-term interests of society….Hazlitt’s most important lesson on morality: High integrity is required for the sustainability of an enterprise over the long term….’Modern capitalism is not an inevitable or inescapable system, but one that has been chosen by the men and women who live under it. It is a system of freedom.’ (Foundations of Morality, 321.)….We need an Army of ‘Hazlitts’ today: men and women of courage and wisdom, who are unafraid to speak and write the truth.”

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