This speech was delivered at a Mises Institute Conference commemorating Henry Hazlitt, held on November 28, 1994, in New York City. Reprinted from Fee.org
The Times Years
Hazlitt was only the editor for a short while, before he decided to go back into newspaper work. In those days, even the New York Times was not as left wing as it is today, and the paper hired Hazlitt to write editorials and review essays, which he did from 1934 to 1946.
Appearing almost daily, his editorials covered an extraordinarily wide range: the dangers of economic controls, the evils of abandoning the gold standard, the stupidity of Blue Eagle planning, the idiocy of protectionism, the evils of wartime price controls, the fraud of Social Security (he was its original prophet of doom), the glories of G.K. Chesterton, the fallacies of Keynesian economics, the futility of foreign aid, the importance of a free market in securities, the hazards of an inflationary monetary policy, the ill-effects of unionization, and much more.
During this time, he met the emigre economist Ludwig von Mises, whose work Hazlitt had admired. Hazlitt and Mises became fast friends, and Mises thrilled to Hazlitt’s editorial blasts against government planning, and often consulted Hazlitt on editorial matters and contemporary politics. It is said that Hazlitt even prepared, at Mises’ request, a version of Human Action as a journalist would have written it. Mises thanked him, but rejected most of the changes.
While at the Times, Hazlitt did whatever he could to hold back the tide of statism. He maintained for 12 years a rapid-fire daily assault against the central state. Whether warning against devaluation or economic embargoes against Japan, which helped lead to Pearl Harbor, he emerges as a true prophet.
Scholars who look back at this period through the eyes of the New York Timeseditorial page might expect to find 100 percent support for Franklin D. Roosevelt. But they are shocked. For Hazlitt—against almost all elite opinion—was at work against FDR. When the American Left discovered this, they arranged for his departure.
But while there, he did a fantastic amount of good. We know FDR received daily reports on New York Times opinion. So did his so-called “brain trust.” How much did Hazlitt hold them back? How much worse would the New Deal have been? The same could be asked after the war. Whatever steps were taken away from price controls and unionization could be due in part to his influence.
In 1938, before he had met Mises, Hazlitt wrote a review of Mises’ Socialism, calling it the most devastating analysis of the system ever written. He became so enthralled with the economic calculation debate that later in the same year he negatively reviewed various responses to Mises, including Polish socialist Oskar Lange’s. It could be said that it was Hazlitt who fully introduced Mises to American audiences. Later he followed up with reviews of Human Action, Bureaucracy, and many others. And six years after he first reviewed Socialism, he reviewed Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and gently criticized Hayek’s concessions to the social democracy that Hazlitt had spent his life fighting.
His studies on the calculation debate became a novel nearly 15 years later, titledThe Great Idea, and later, Time Will Run Back. And talk about prescience! It concerned how to transform a socialist system into a free market-at a time when most people thought socialism was the unstoppable wave of the future.
Hazlitt enjoyed his years at the Times, yet as with his previous positions, he eventually came under pressure from the publisher to compromise himself. Hazlitt had taken on Keynes’ plans to reconstruct the monetary system after the war, and predicted worldwide inflation in the decades ahead. The Times, however, was moving to the Left, and so wanted to endorse the Bretton Woods agreement, including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
“Now, Henry,” Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger said to him, “when 43 governments sign an agreement, I don’t see how The Times can any longer combat this.”
“All right,” Hazlitt said, “but in that case I can’t write anything further about Bretton Woods. It is an inflationist scheme that will end badly and I can’t support it.” Hazlitt was not fired immediately, although at one point, management threatened to put a disclaimer under his editorials. Soon after, he was squeezed out, but landed a job with Newsweek, and became one of the most influential financial writers in the country. His weekly “BusinessTides” column was enduringly popular. Surveys of the readership invariably showed that many subscribers took the magazine solely to read this column. I was among them.
While at Newsweek, his Economics in One Lesson appeared. As one of the most influential books on economics ever written, it has sold nearly one million copies and is available in at least ten languages. Hazlitt argued that government intervention focuses on the consequences that are seen, and ignores those that are not. These include wealth not created and even destroyed by regulation, inflation, and taxation. In 1947, he wrote Will Dollars Save the World?, a book attacking the Marshall Plan, which he saw as an international welfare scheme. The subsequent history of U.S. foreign aid shows just how right he was.
In 1950, Hazlitt took on additional responsibilities to become editor, along with John Chamberlain, of the fortnightly magazine The Freeman. He continued writing for The Freeman after its acquisition by the Foundation for Economic Education in the mid-fifties. Some of his best articles published there were later collected into FEE’s The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt.
In 1959, Hazlitt came out with The Failure of the “New Economics,” an extraordinary line-by-line refutation of John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory. And though it was panned by the American academic journals at the time, it enlivened a growing movement favoring free markets over state planning. It continues to be an essential resource. A year later, Hazlitt collected a series of scholarly attacks on Keynes as The Critics of Keynesian Economics, also still very useful.
In the mid-sixties, Hazlitt turned his attention to the ethical basis of capitalism. Thus his book The Foundations of Morality, which he called his proudest achievement.
Now recall that during this time, he was still writing a weekly column forNewsweek, and speaking all over the country, meaning he was already busier than most academics. But after 20 years, another parting occurred in 1966. As Kenneth Auchincloss, managing editor, wrote years later, “At the time he was writing, there were readers–and perhaps even some Newsweek editors–who must have considered him old-fashioned, out of touch with the times. But Henry would never have considered trimming his opinions to the patterns of the day.”
After he left Newsweek, he wrote a popular weekly column for the Los Angeles Times, which was syndicated around the country. Then he embarked on some new books.
He wrote Man vs. the Welfare State, which demonstrated that welfare promotes what it pretends to discourage. This was 20 years before Charles Murray’s LosingGround. Then he wrote The Conquest of Poverty showing us how to get out of the welfare mess. In it he refuted such schemes as Milton Friedman’s negative income tax, and urged immediate abolition of welfare.
His last complete book was published in 1984, when Hazlitt was 90 years old. It was a collection—the only one then in print—of the best writings of the Stoic philosophers Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.
An unfinished manuscript of what would have been his last book sits in his collection at Syracuse University. It is a skeptical look at animal rights. His last published scholarly article appeared in the first issue of the Review of Austrian Economics, the journal co-published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
The Future of Liberty
Thirty years ago tonight, a group of friends gathered in this city on the occasion of Hazlitt’s 70th birthday. It was only weeks after Lyndon Baines Johnson had been elected, and these freedom lovers were saddened at the state of the world, but at the same time ready to fight. Ludwig von Mises paid tribute to his “distinguished friend.” “In this age at 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.” “Every friend of freedom may today, in this post-election month, be rather pessimistic about the future. But let us not forget that there is rising a new generation of defenders of freedom.” “If we succeed,” Mises said to Hazlitt, “it will be to a great extent your merit, the fruit of the work that you have done in the first 70 years of your life.”
Hazlitt then reflected on his life, and in so doing painted a dark picture of the state of human liberty. Yet “none of us is yet on the torture rack; we are not yet in jail; we’re getting various harrassments and annoyances, but what we mainly risk is merely our popularity, the danger that we will be called nasty names.”
“We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us…. Even those of us who have reached and passed our 70th birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives dozing in the Florida sun. 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 human liberty, which means the future of civilization.”
The great voice of Henry Hazlitt, “the economic conscience of our country and our nation,” is now stilled. But this journalist of the century will not be forgotten. In a time dominated by prevaricators and planners, in a nation still threatened by statism, Hazlitt’s written legacy, will continue to inspire writers and scholars.
We need more economists like Henry Hazlitt, who are willing to write in defense of free enterprise, and do so in plain English and to adhere to principle, whether analyzing history, theory, or present policy, regardless of the personal cost.
If we win, as Mises said, we can in part thank Henry Hazlitt. Yet Hazlitt has never gotten his due. And we know why: because he was right–right about the New Deal, right about Keynes, right about the attack on reason, right about the welfare state, right about inflation, and right about the morality of capitalism. Our age cannot tolerate that. The intellectual establishment has too much invested in the present failure to admit who the real prophets of this century are.
Henry Hazlitt, although he made a profound difference in our age, seemed sometimes to be from another time. He had the breadth and gravitas of a Cicero, the moral force of a Tacitus, and like his beloved Stoics, lived a life of honor and principle. The ancient republic of Rome would have cherished him. So should we. And if we restore the American republic, his bust should someday stand in our Senate, among those of our greatest men.
