Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Time Will Run Back A Novel About the Rediscovery of Capitalism by Henry Hazlitt Novel Economics. Economist Bruce Yandle tells of his first encounter with Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson : “I thought to myself, ‘What arrogance!’” Bruce said. “Here was I, fresh from surviving four years in a rigorous economics Ph.D. program, and I run across this slim book in which a journalist announces that he’s going to teach economics in one lesson. Ha!” “Well, buddy,” Bruce continues. “I read that book and, darn it, the title proved to be absolutely right. It is economics in one lesson.” Henry Hazlitt’s works do indeed challenge our obsession with pedigrees. He held no university degree and yet he understood economics more deeply and more widely than 95 percent of all Ph.D.-sporting economists. One piece of solid evidence of Hazlitt’s deep understanding is his crystalline prose. His explanations are so smooth that readers sense that his words spilled from his pen effortlessly. But I’m sure that “effortless” does not apply to Hazlitt’s writing. To write as clearly as he wrote requires not only profound knowledge but hard work. Hazlitt’s impressive understanding and style are on full display in his 1951 novel, Time Will Run Back (originally titled The Great Idea ). Formally a work of fiction, it is really an extended lesson in economics—one not only easy to digest, but one that “tastes” good too. It has neither jargon nor pedantry, just crisp explanations of the basic workings of an economy, spiced with compelling insights on the nature of the tyranny that inevitably is unleashed by attempts at central planning. The story opens when the dictator of Wonworld, Stalenin, falls ill and summons his only son from Bermuda, where the boy and his mother have lived since his birth, mercifully without much contact with the rest of the centrally planned tyranny that covers the globe. Wonworld is the name of the worldwide Marxist dictatorship that was created nearly 200 years earlier, in the late twentieth century, when the forces of communism defeated the last hold-out forces of capitalism and freedom. The son, twenty-something Peter, arrives in the capital, Moscow, free of the brainwashing that numbed and ruined the minds of almost everyone else in Wonworld. Although at first accepting Marxist central planning as the only feasible means of organizing a decent society, Peter is one of few people in Wonworld who retains the power of critical observation and rational thought. His father wants Peter to succeed him as Wonworld’s dictator. Despite intrigues and assassination attempts by Stalenin’s rivals for the top post, Peter manages to assume—while his father inches closer to death—much of the absolute power. But in an unbelievable (but forgivable) plot twist, the power does not go to Peter’s head. Instead, he remembers the horrors that he witnessed during his first days in Moscow—days that he spent as an obscure newcomer. He remembers that a girl he liked was taken away in the middle of the night on vague trumped-up charges and never again seen. He remembers that all “bourgeois” music, literature, and art have been destroyed, including the Mozart that he so loved, and replaced with grim propaganda productions. He remembers the lies incessantly trumpeted by the state- controlled press—lies about increases in the economy’s output and advances in living standards. And he remembers the out-and-out fear that haunted everyone. Peter is determined to change this, determined to enable the people of Wonworld to grow wealthier and freer. He senses that something is terribly wrong, but learns just what this something is only gradually, through long discussions with Thomas Jefferson Adams, one of the few Americans who is a member of the politburo. Adams is the only other member of that governing body whose heart and mind are large enough to share Peter’s concern for the welfare of ordinary people. Most of the novel is an extended dialogue on economics between Peter and Adams, with Peter discovering economic truths along the way, both directly through his conversations with Adams and through observing the consequences of market liberalization compared with market regimentation. In his role as benevolent despot, Peter first frees up consumer markets. He’s surprised to find that brokers soon emerge to make it easier for people to barter their goods. Even more surprising is the emergence of market prices expressed in the quantity of cigarettes, much as in the true story told by R. A. Radford in “The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp.” Eventually, Peter discovers that greater production—in quantity and quality—is possible only with free markets in producer goods. And this discovery is soon followed by the realization that free markets require private property rights and freedom of contract. The discussion between Peter and Adams on this point is a synopsis of the socialist-calculation debate that began with Ludwig von Mises’s work. Flight to America. In between Peter and Adams’s conversations, Peter’s enemies wrest control of the army. A civil war is in the offing. Peter and Adams, retaining the loyalty of the air force, flee to what was once the United States, where they proclaim their own rule, independent of Wonworld. Setting up shop in the White House, they continue their dialogue, exploring every aspect of economics. The economy of Free World, as they call their new country, is increasingly freed from government control. Vast markets for consumer goods, capital goods, and financial instruments emerge from the millions of individual actions of these now-free people. Their prosperity grows along with their freedom. Peter then realizes that the freedom he helped restore will never be secure unless the state’s powers are seriously and permanently curtailed. He introduces constitutionally limited democracy and refuses—despite his enormous popularity—to run for the highest political office in the land. He chooses instead to devote himself to his piano. Wonworld’s tyrants eventually attack Free World, but Free World’s far greater creativity and productivity give its people the edge they need to defeat their communist foes. Free World flourishes. It’s an optimistic tale, one in which freedom is restored after humankind has trod the road to complete tyranny. Having traveled far down that road, might we be destined to complete this awful journey? The crumbling of the Iron Curtain suggests not. But let’s not be too confident. While Marxism lies in history’s dustbin, state-worship remains vibrant. Faith in the powers and benevolence of elite political “leaders” ultimately fuels the passage along this terrible road. Thus this faith must forever be challenged. One good way is to read Henry Hazlitt. An even better way is to produce more Hazlitts who think and communicate as clearly as he did. Henry Hazlitt. Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons . Henry Stuart Hazlitt Austrian School Born November ( 1894-Template:MONTHNUMBER-28 ) 28, 1894 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Died July 9, 1993 ( 1993-Template:MONTHNUMBER-09 ) (aged 98) Nationality American Field economics literary criticism philosophy Opposed John Maynard Keynes Influences Benjamin Anderson, Frédéric Bastiat, David Hume, William James, H.L. Mencken, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Herbert Spencer, Philip Wicksteed Influenced Steve Forbes, Milton Friedman, Ron Paul, George Reisman, Murray Rothbard, Paul Samuelson, Peter Schiff, Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, Gene Callahan. Henry Stuart Hazlitt (November 28, 1894 – July 9, 1993) was an American economist, philosopher, literary critic and journalist for such publications as The Wall Street Journal , The Nation , The American Mercury , Newsweek , and The New York Times , and he has been recognized as a leading interpreter of economic issues from the perspective of American conservatism and libertarianism. [1] Contents. Life [ edit | edit source ] Capital and Interest Human Action Individualism and Economic Order Man, Economy, and State Principles of Economics. Henry Hazlitt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in relative poverty, his father having died when Hazlitt was an infant. His early heroes were Herbert Spencer and William James, and his first ambition was for an academic career in psychology and philosophy. He attended New York's tuition-free City College, but left after only a short time in order to support his twice- widowed mother. [2] Hazlitt started his career at The Wall Street Journal as secretary to the managing editor when he was still a teenager, and his interest in the field of economics began while working there. His studies led him to The Common Sense of Political Economy by Philip Wicksteed which, he later said, was his first "tremendous influence" in the subject. [3] Hazlitt published his first book, Thinking as a Science , at the age of 21. During World War I, he served in the Army Air Service in Texas, after which he returned to New York, residing at Washington Square Park for many years. [4] In the early 1920s, he was financial editor of The New York Evening Mail , and it was during this period, Hazlitt reported, that his understanding of economics was further refined by frequent discussions with former Harvard economics professor Benjamin Anderson who was then working for Chase National Bank in Manhattan. Later, when the publisher W. W. Norton suggested he write an official biography of their author Bertrand Russell, Hazlitt spent "a good deal of time," as he described it, with the famous philosopher both in New York City and London. [5] Lord Russell "so admired the young journalist's talent" that he had agreed with Norton's proposal, [6] but the project ended after nearly two years of work when Russell declared his intention to write his own autobiography. [5] During the interwar decades, a vibrant period in the history of American literature, Hazlitt served as literary editor of The New York Sun (1925– 1929), and as literary editor of the Left-leaning journal, The Nation (1930–1933). In connection with his work for The Nation , Hazlitt also edited A Practical Program for America (1932), a compilation of Great Depression policy considerations, but he was in the minority in calling for less government intervention in the economy. After a series of public debates with socialist Louis Fischer, Hazlitt and The Nation parted ways. [7] In 1933, Hazlitt published The Anatomy of Criticism , an extended "trialogue" examining the nature of literary criticism and appreciation, regarded by some to be an early refutation of literary deconstruction. [6] In the same year, he became H. L. Mencken's chosen successor as editor of the literary magazine, The American Mercury , which Mencken had founded with George Jean Nathan. [8] Due to increasing differences with the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., he served in that role for only a brief time, but Mencken wrote that Hazlitt was the "only competent critic of the arts that I have heard of who was at the same time a competent economist, of practical as well as theoretical training," adding that he "is one of the few economists in human history who could really write." [9] In 1929, Hazlitt married Valerie Earle, daughter of the noted photographer and Vitagraph film director William P. S. Earle. They were married by the pacifist minister, John Haynes Holmes, but later divorced. [10] In 1936, he married Frances Kanes, the author of The Concise Bible , [11] with whom he later collaborated to produce an anthology of the Stoic philosophers, The Wisdom of the Stoics: Selections from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius (1984). They were married until Frances' death in 1991. [12] From 1934 to 1946, Hazlitt was the principal editorial writer on finance and economics for The New York Times , writing both a signed weekly column along with most of the unsigned editorials on economics, producing a considerable volume of work. [4] Following World War II, he came into conflict with Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times , over the newly established Bretton Woods system which created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Hazlitt opposed the Bretton Woods Agreement, primarily fearing the risk of inflation. After agreeing not to write on the topic, he looked for another venue for his work, deciding on Newsweek magazine, for which he wrote a signed column, "Business Tides," from 1946 to 1966. [9] According to Hazlitt, the greatest influence on his writing in economics was the work of Ludwig von Mises, and he is credited with introducing the ideas of the Austrian School of economics to the English-speaking layman. In 1938, for example, he reviewed the recently published English translation of Mises’s influential treatise Socialism for The New York Times , declaring it "a classic" and “the most devastating analysis of socialism yet penned." [13] After the Jewish economist's emigration to the United States from Nazi-dominated Europe in 1940, Hazlitt arranged for Mises to contribute editorials to The New York Times , and helped to secure for Mises a teaching position at New York University. Along with the efforts of his friends, Max Eastman and John Chamberlain, Hazlitt also helped introduce F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom to the American reading public. His 1944 review in The New York Times caused Reader's Digest , where Eastman served as roving editor, to publish one of its trademark condensations, bringing the future Nobel laureate's work to a vast audience. [14] Unlike many other writers of his generation from the political right, Hazlitt never experienced a period when he was a socialist or communist, or a significant change in his classical liberal political views. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Established by Leonard Read in 1946, FEE is considered to be the first "think tank" for free market ideas. He was also one of the original members of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. [15] With John Chamberlain (and Suzanne La Follette as managing editor), Hazlitt served as editor of the early free market publication The Freeman from 1950 to 1952, and as sole editor-in-chief from 1952 to 1953. Its contributors during his tenure there included Hayek, Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, as well as the writers James Burnham, John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, John T. Flynn, Frank Meyer, Raymond Moley, Morrie Ryskind and George Sokolsky. [16] Prior to his becoming editor, The Freeman had supported Senator Joseph McCarthy in his conflict with President Harry Truman on the issue of communism, "undiscriminatingly" according to some critics, but upon becoming editor, Hazlitt changed the magazine's policy to one of support for President Truman. [17] The Freeman is widely considered to be an important forerunner to the conservative National Review , founded by William F. Buckley, Jr., which from the start included many of the same contributing editors. [18] Hazlitt himself was on the masthead of National Review , either as a Contributing Editor or, later, as Contributor, from its inception in 1955 until his death in 1993. There were differences between the journals: The Freeman under Hazlitt was more secular and presented a wider range of foreign policy opinion than the later National Review . [17] Even prior to her success with The Fountainhead , the novelist Ayn Rand was a friend of both Hazlitt and his wife, Frances, and it was Hazlitt who introduced Rand to Mises, bringing together the two figures who would become most associated with the defense of pure laissez-faire capitalism. [19] The two became admirers of Hazlitt and of one another. [20] Hazlitt became well known both through his articles and by frequently debating prominent politicians on the radio, including: Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and U.S. Senators Paul Douglas and Hubert H. Humphrey, the future Vice President. [4] In the early 1950s, he also occasionally appeared on the New York television current events program Longines Chronoscope , interviewing figures such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., along with coeditor William Bradford Huie. [21] At the invitation of philosopher Sidney Hook, he was also a participating member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s. [22] When he finally left Newsweek in 1966, the magazine replaced Hazlitt with three university professors: "free-market monetarist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, middle-of-the-roader Henry Wallich of Yale, and Keynesian Paul A. Samuelson of M.I.T." [4] His last published scholarly article appeared in the first volume of The Review of Austrian Economics (now, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics ) in 1987. Hazlitt died at the age of 98. The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt (2009). Courtesy the Ludwig von Mises Institute and Wikimedia Commons . Writing [ edit | edit source ] "The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization." [23] Economics in One Lesson (1946) has been called Hazlitt's "most enduring contribution," [23] with a million copies sold and available in ten languages, [24] it is considered an "enduring classic" in conservative, free market and libertarian circles. [25] Ayn Rand called it a "magnificent job of theoretical exposition," while Congressman Ron Paul ranks it with the works of Frédéric Bastiat and F. A. Hayek. [26] Hayek himself praised the work, as did fellow Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman, who said that Hazlitt's description of the price system, for example, was "a true classic: timeless, correct, painlessly instructive." [4] In his book Basic Economics , Thomas Sowell also compliments Hazlitt, and Sowell's work has been cited as "following" in the "Bastiat-Hazlitt tradition" of economic exposition. [27] In 1996, Laissez Faire Books issued a 50th anniversary edition with an introduction by publisher and presidential candidate Steve Forbes. [28] Another of his enduring works is The Failure of the New Economics (1959), a detailed, chapter-by-chapter critique of John Maynard Keynes's highly influential General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , about which he paraphrased a quote attributed to Samuel Johnson, that he was "unable to find in it a single doctrine that is both true and original. What is original in the book is not true; and what is true is not original." [28] Hazlitt also published three books on the subject of inflation, including From Bretton Woods to World Inflation (1984), and two influential works on poverty, Man vs. The Welfare State (1969), and The Conquest of Poverty (1973), thought by some to have anticipated the later work of Charles Murray in Losing Ground . [29] His major work in philosophy is The Foundations of Morality (1964), a treatise on ethics defending utilitarianism, which builds on the work of David Hume and John Stuart Mill. Hazlitt's 1922 work, The Way to Will-Power has been described as a defense of free will or "individual initiative against the deterministic claims of Freudian psychoanalysis." [6] In contrast to many other thinkers on the political right, he was an agnostic with regard to religious beliefs. [30] In A New Constitution Now (1942), published during Franklin D. Roosevelt's unprecedented third term as President of the United States, Hazlitt called for the replacement of the existing fixed-term presidential tenure in the United States with a more Anglo-European system of "cabinet" government, under which a head of state who had lost the confidence of the legislature or cabinet might be removed from office after a no- confidence vote in as little as 30 days. (Shortly following FDR's death, presidential term limits were enacted.) His 1951 novel, The Great Idea (reissued in 1966 as Time Will Run Back ) depicts rulers of a centrally-planned socialist dystopia discovering, amid the resulting economic chaos, the need to restore market pricing system, private ownership of capital goods and competitive markets. Hazlitt was a prolific writer, authoring 25 works in his lifetime. Recognition [ edit | edit source ] He was awarded an Honorary Doctoral Degree at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan in his speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), named Hazlitt as one of the " [i]ntellectual leaders" (along with Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Russell Kirk, James Burnham and Frank Meyer) who had "shaped so much of our thoughts. " [31] Ludwig von Mises said at a dinner honoring Hazlitt: "In this age of the great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you are our leader. You have indefatigably fought against the step-by-step advance of the powers anxious to destroy everything that human civilization has created over a long period of centuries. You are the economic conscience of our country and of our nation." [28] The Reformer's Plight in The Great Idea. I’m a fan of dystopian fiction, but I overlooked Henry Hazlitt’s The Great Idea (subsequently republished as Time Will Run Back ) until last December. I feared a long-winded, clunky version of Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson , but I gave it a chance, and my gamble paid off. I read the whole thing (almost 400 pages) on a red-eye flight – feeling wide awake the whole way. The book’s premise: Centuries hence, mankind groans under a world Communist government centered in Moscow. People live in Stalinist fear and penury. Censorship is so extreme that virtually all pre-revolutionary writings have been destroyed; even Marx has been censored, to prevent anyone from reverse engineering whatever “capitalism” was. However, due to a marital dispute, Peter Uldanov, the dictator’s son, was raised in an island paradise, free of both the horrors and the rationalizations of his dystopian society. When the dictator nears death, he brings Peter to Moscow and appoints him his heir. The well-meaning but naive Peter is instantly horrified by Communism, and sets out to fix it. In time, he rediscovers free-market economics, and sets the world to right. Yes, this sounds trite to me, too. But Hazlitt is a master of pacing. It takes almost 200 pages before any of Peter’s reforms start to work. Until then, it’s one false start after another, because so many of the seemingly dysfunctional policies of the Stalinist society are remedies for other dysfunctional policies. Here’s Peter arguing with Adams, a reform-minded Communist minister. “…The hard fact is that some people simply have to do more unpleasant chores than others, and the only way we can get the unpleasant chores done is by compulsion. Not everybody can be a manager, or an actor or an artist or a violin player. Somebody has to dig the coal, collect the garbage, repair the sewers. Nobody will deliberately choose these smelly jobs. People will have to be assigned to them, forced to do them.” “Well, perhaps we could compensate them in some way, Adams—say by letting them work shorter hours than the others.” “We thought of that long ago, chief. It didn’t work. It unluckily turned out that it was only the pleasant jobs, like acting or violin playing, that could be reduced to short hours. But we simply can’t afford to have people work only a few hours on the nasty jobs. These are precisely the jobs that have to be done. We couldn’t afford to cut our coal production in half by cutting the hours in half, for example; and we just haven’t got the spare manpower to rotate. Besides, we found that on most such jobs a considerable loss of time and production was involved merely in changing shifts.” “All right,” agreed Peter; “so under our socialist system we can’t have freedom in choice of work or occupation. But couldn’t we provide some freedom of initiative —at least for those who direct production? Our propaganda is always urging more initiative on the part of commissars or individual plant managers. Why don’t we get it?” “Because a commissar or plant manager, chief, is invariably shot if his initiative goes wrong. The very fact that he was using his own initiative means that he was not following orders. How can you reconcile individual initiative with planning from the center? When we draw up our Five Year Plans, we allocate the production of hundreds of different commodities and services in accordance with what we assume to be the needs of the people. Now if every plant manager decided for himself what things his plant should produce or how much it should produce of them, our production would turn out to be completely unbalanced and chaotic.” “Very well,” Peter said; “so we can’t permit the individual plant manager to decide what to produce or how much to produce of it. But this is certainly a big disadvantage. For if someone on the Central Planning Board doesn’t think of some new need to be satisfied, or some new way of satisfying an old need, then nobody thinks of it and nobody dares to supply it. But I have in mind something different from that. How can we encourage individual plant managers to devise more efficient ways of producing the things they are ordered to produce? If these plant managers can’t be encouraged to invent new or better consumption goods, at least they can be encouraged to invent new methods or machines to produce more economically the consumption goods they are ordered to produce, or to produce a higher quality of those consumption goods.” “You’re just back to the same problem,” Adams said. “If I’m a plant manager, and I invent a new machine, I’ll have to ask the Central Planning Board to get somebody to build it, or to allocate the materials to me so that I can build it. In either case I’ll upset the preordained central plan. I’ll have a hard job convincing the Central Planning Board that my invention or experiment won’t fail. If my invention does fail, and it turns out that I have wasted scarce labor and materials, I will be removed and probably shot. The member of the Central Planning Board who approved my project will be lucky if he isn’t shot himself. Therefore, unless the success of my invention or experiment seems absolutely certain in advance, I will be well advised to do what everybody else does. Then if I fail, I can prove that I failed strictly according to the rules…” Finally Peter settles on a seemingly simpler radical reform: “Well, I can think of one more kind of freedom,” Peter said, “and I am determined to create it. That is the freedom to criticize the government.” Adams started. He seemed to waver between incredulity and alarm. “You mean that you would permit people to criticize the actions of the government, and perhaps even denounce the government, and go unpunished?” “Exactly!” “Why, chief, you and I would be destroyed in a few weeks! If we allowed people to criticize us with impunity they would lose all fear of us—all respect for us. There would be an explosion of criticism that would blow us out of our seats—out of Wonworld. And what would we accomplish? Our successors would, of course, immediately suppress criticism again, for their own survival. “ What happens surprises them both. Peter eagerly looked forward to the results of his reform. There weren’t any. None of the things happened that Adams had predicted. On the other hand, none of the consequences followed that Peter had hoped for. There was simply an intensification of the kind of criticism that had already been going on. People in superior positions continued to criticize people in subordinate positions; they continued to put the blame for failure on people who were not in a position to protect themselves; they continued to accuse people in minor positions of being deviationists and wreckers. This was what had always been known as communist self-criticism. Peter put out still another proclamation. He ordered a stop to this sort of criticism. For a while it greatly diminished. But still no subordinate criticized his superior, and no one criticized the Politburo, the Party, or the government itself. “What happened, Adams? Or rather, why didn’t anything happen?” Adams smiled. “I should have foreseen this, chief. It should have been obvious. All that happened is that nobody trusted your proclamation. They thought it was a trick.” “A trick?” “Yes—a trick to smoke them out. A trick to find out who were the enemies of the government, and to liquidate them. Everybody waited for somebody else to stick his neck out, to see what would happen to him. Nobody wanted to be the first. So nobody was.” Much the same happens when Peter orders free elections. Later, he launches a seemingly plausible experiment in worker management: “One of our great troubles, Adams, is that we are trying to plan more than any human mind can hold. We are trying to plan every industry—and all their interrelations—and all the rest. Why not let the workers of each industry control and police their own industry? That would decentralize control and break up the planning problem into manageable units.” “The idea has possibilities, chief . . . but it might lead to results we couldn’t foresee.” “Precisely,” said Peter; “and that is why we ought to try it out.” […] “Why not try it out, then, only on a small scale? Why not apply the idea, Adams, in only one province—far away from Moscow? Why not throw a censorship around that district, so that no news could get in or out until we were certain that the experiment was a success?” “Have you decided, chief, who our guinea pigs would be?” “How about the Soviet Republic of Peru? That’s certainly remote enough!” Here’s what goes down in Soviet Peru: At the very start he found himself confronted in Peru by a problem of unexpected difficulty. He wanted each industry to be self-governing and independent. But what was an industry? Where did each industry begin and end?… At the end, when the Peruvian commissars he had appointed had finished their work, they had named fifty-seven different industries… A temporary head was named for each industry. Someone jokingly nicknamed these heads the industry “czars.” Each industry was told to organize itself in any way it thought fit, provided each worker was allowed an equal vote. The industry could fix its own production, its own prices or terms of exchange, its own hours and conditions of work, its own entrance requirements. Some Peruvians called the new system “syndicalism”; others called it “guild socialism”; and still others liked the name “corporativism.” Peter returned to Moscow, promising to be back in Peru in six months to see how the new system was working. He left a secret cable code with the three top commissars to keep him informed. Before two months had passed he received urgent cables begging for his return. He came back to find a chaotic situation bordering on civil war. The first thing the workers in each industry had done had been to exclude anybody else from entering the industry. Each industry had quickly discovered that it could exact the best terms of exchange for its particular product by rendering it relatively scarce. There had then developed a competitive race for scarcity instead of for production. The workers in each industry voted themselves shorter and shorter hours. Each industry was either withholding goods or threatening to suspend production altogether until it got the prices it demanded for the particular kind of goods it had to supply. Peter was indignant. He called in the various syndicates of workers representing each industry and denounced them in blistering terms for the selfish and shortsighted way in which they had “abused” the privileges he had conferred upon them. But as he studied the matter further he cooled off, and took a more objective view. He was forced to acknowledge to himself that the fault was his own. It was inherent in the system he had set up. He had allowed each industry to become an unrestrained monopoly. The more essential or irreplaceable the product that it made, therefore, the more it could and would squeeze everybody else… He dismantled the new system entirely, and ordered the restoration of the old centralized socialism under the Central Planning Board at Moscow. In most literary dialogues, at least one of the characters has the answers. (“Yes, Socrates, you are quite right!”) What’s novel about Hazlitt’s dialogues is that all the characters are deeply confused. Even when they sound reasonable, the Complexity of the World repeatedly makes fools of them. The Great Idea was originally published in 1951. Stalin was still alive. Fifteen years later, Hazlitt wrote a new introduction with a grim forecast: The Communist rulers cannot permit private ownership of the means of production not merely because this would mean the surrender of the central principle of their system, but because it would mean the restoration of individual liberty and the end of their despotic power. So I confess that the hope that some day an idealistic Peter Uldanov, miraculously finding himself at the pinnacle of power, will voluntarily restore the right of property, is a dream likely to be fulfilled only in fiction. But it is certainly not altogether idle to hope that, with a growth of economic understanding among their own people, the hands of the Communist dictators may some day be forced, more violently than Lenin’s were when the mutiny at Kronstadt, though suppressed, forced him to adopt the New Economic Policy. Hazlitt was, of course, thoroughly wrong. As far as we can tell, Gorbachev never had any intention of restoring capitalism. But Yeltsin – a career Communist – did just that. And despite all the disappointment Putin has provoked, the former Soviet Union has seen nothing remotely approaching the horrors of the Russian Civil War. The actually-existing dystopia of the Soviet Union practically died in its sleep, proving Hazlitt’s fiction to be the opposite of wishful thinking. The Critics of Keynesian Economics. Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was a libertarian philosopher, an economist, and a journalist. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine, an influential libertarian publication. Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson , his seminal work, in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy. Отзывы. Дополнительная информация. Где читать книги. Смартфоны/планшеты. Ноутбуки и настольные компьютеры. Устройства для чтения книг. Похожие электронные книги. He was struggling with integrating his two main interests: literary criticism and economics. In economics, value is subjective, whereas the key goal in literary criticism is the discovery of something approximating objective value. The text of this book reflects that struggle in the form of a trialogue. Hazlitt has his characters debate the question of literary value, and pushes forward the proposition that the value of literature is discerned and revealed through the operation of the "social mind." So he ends up rejecting relativism while avoiding mistakes in economic theory. A fascinating study, brilliantly conceived and rendered by a master. The Mises Institute's new edition of Man Economy, and State , united with its formerly sundered companion volume Power and Market , is a landmark in the history of the Institute. It takes this book out of the category of underground classic and raises it up to its proper status as one of the great economic treatises of all time, a book that is essential for anyone seeking a robust economic education. This new edition will take your breath away with its beauty and quality. It's remarkable that a book this thick could lay so flat and be so durable with super-solid binding. It somehow turns out not to be unweildy. Get it with the Study Guide and you will have what you need. The captivating new introduction by Professor Joseph Salerno that frames up the Rothbardian contribution in a completely new way, and reassesses the place of this book in the history of economic thought. In Salerno's view, Rothbard was not attempting to write a distinctively "Austrian" book but rather a comprehensive treatise on economics that eschewed the Keynesian and positivist corruptions. This is what accounts for its extraordinarily logical structure and depth. That it would later be called Austrian is only due to the long-lasting nature of the corruptions of economics that Rothbard tried to correct. For years, the Mises Institute has kept it in print and sold thousands of copies in a nice paperback version. Then we decided to take a big step and put out an edition worthy of this great treatise. It is the Scholar's Edition of Man, Economy, and State --an edition that immediately became definitive and used throughout the world. The footnotes (which are so brilliant and informative!) are at the bottom of every page. The index is huge and comprehensive. The binding is impeccable and its beauty unmatched. Students have used this book for decades as the intellectual foil for what they have been required to learning from conventional economics classes. In many ways, it has built the Austrian school in the generation that followed Mises. It was Rothbard who polished the Austrian contribution to theory and wove it together with a full-scale philosophy of political ethics that inspired the generation of the Austrian revival, and continues to fuel its growth and development today. From Rothbard, we learn that economics is the science that deals with the rise and fall of civilization, the advancement and retrenchment of human development, the feeding and healing of the multitudes, and the question of whether human affairs are dominated by cooperation or violence. Economics in Rothbard's wonderful book emerges as the beautiful logic of that underlies human action in a world of scarcity, the lens on how exchange makes it possible for people to cooperate toward their mutual betterment. We see how money facilitates this, and allows for calculation over time that permits capital to expand and investment to take place. We see how entrepreneurship, based on real judgments and risk taking, is the driving force of the market. What's striking is how this remarkable book has lived in the shadows for so long. It began as a guide to Human Action , and it swelled into a treatise in its own right. Rothbard worked many years on the book, even as he was completing his PhD at Columbia University. He realized better than anyone else that Mises's economic theories were so important that they needed restatement and interpretation. But he also knew that Misesian theory needed elaboration, expansion, and application in a variety of areas. The result was much more: a rigorous but accessible defense of the whole theory of the market economy, from its very foundations. But the publisher decided to cut the last part of the book, a part that appeared years later as Power and Market This is the section that applies the theory presented in the first 1,000 pages to matters of government intervention. Issue by issue, the book refutes the case for taxation, the welfare state, regulation, economic planning, and all forms of socialism, large and small. It remains an incredibly fruitful assembly of vigorous argumentation and evidence. A major advantage of Man, Economy, and State , in addition to its systematic presentation, is that it is written in the clearest English you will find anywhere in the economics literature. The jargon is kept to a minimum. The prose is crystalline and vigorous. The examples are compelling. No one has explained the formation of prices, the damage of inflation, the process of production, the workings of interest rates, and a hundred of topics, with such energy and clarity. Over years, students have told us that this book is what made it possible for them to get through graduate school. Why? Because Rothbard takes on the mainstream in its own terms and provides a radical, logical, comprehensive answer. If you have read the book, you know the feeling that comes with reaching the last page: one walks away with the sense that one now fully understands economic theory and all its ramifications. It is a shame that the authentic edition of the classic that Rothbard wrote fully 40 years ago is only now coming into print. And yet the good news is that, at last, this remarkable work in the history of ideas, the book that makes such a technically competent, systematic, and sweeping case for the economics of liberty, is at last available. As the result of many years of sagacious and discerning meditation, [Rothbard] joins the ranks of the eminent economists by publishing a voluminous work, a systematic treatise on economics. An epochal contribution to the general science of human action, praxeology, and its practically most important and up-to-now best elaborated part, economics. Henceforth all essential studies in in these branches of knowledge will have to take full account of the theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard. -- Ludwig von Mises. It is in fact the most important general treatise on economic principles since Ludwig von Mises's Human Action in 1949. -- Henry Hazlitt. Man, Economy, and State is Murray Rothbard's main work in economic theory. It appeared in 1962, when Murray was only 36 years old. In it Murray develops the entire body of economic theory, in a step by step fashion, beginning with incontestable axioms and proceeding to the most intricate problems of business cycle theory and fundamental breakthroughs in monopoly theory. And along the way he presents a blistering refutation of all variants of mathematical economics. The book has in the meantime become a modern classic and ranks with Mises's Human Action as one of the two towering achievements of the Austrian School of economics. In Power and Market , Murray analyzed the economic consequences of any conceivable form of government interference in markets. The Scholars Edition brings both books together to form a magnificent whole. -- Hans-Hermann Hoppe. The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt. The masterful economics teacher and author of Economics in One Lesson moves his readers to a deeper knowledge of a range of topics in this outstanding collection of essays, aptly titled The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt. In the late 1990s, Hans Sennholz carefully selected 30 of Hazlitt's articles that appeared mostly in the Freeman but also other places, and compiled them into a single book. Most of these articles have appeared in no other collection. The book begins with a piece written at the end of Hazlitt's life, "Reflections at 70." The next piece is a reflection on a book he wrote when he was a very young man, a piece on the art of thinking. So here we have the bookends to an extraordinary life of thinking and writing. The next section deals with the market economy, and here the editor has selected Hazlitt's shortest pieces on a variety of topics, from private ownership to prices to income distribution. Next, he deals with the enemies of the market economy. A large section follows that covers the welfare state, foreign aid, and other issues of development economics. The book ends with an inspiring selection about the future of the battle between capitalism and planning. While this is not a systematic treatise, it provides an outstanding overview of all of Hazlitt's writings. The choices reflect Sennholz's own interests, but those are also the interests of anyone who appreciates Hazlitt's contribution to communicating economic truth to all people. The collection is indeed well named!