Economics in One Lesson

Claiming the purpose of your book is to debunk economic "myths" while actually smuggling in a whole slew of myths of your own is a pretty damn impressive psyop. Gotta hand it to Hazlitt for that approach.

Like most Austrian-based stuff, there's enough truth sprinkled among the misrepresentations to make the whole thing sound reasonable to laypeople. That's the point of the con, after all--make the ignorant feel smart without really challenging their hegemonic narratives in any fundamental way. This book is one of the popular examples of that. It distills Mises (i.e. cuts the blatant racism, classism, and antisemitism out), rephrases Bastiat (i.e. hides his misrepresentations of socialist frameworks more successfully), and packages it all in an easily digestible, thin volume that appeals.

The actual substance of the book is pretty unoriginal, regurgitating economic ideas that were already outdated in the 1940s. But that makes it no different than any other purely Austrian School book that has come out over the past century. No theory. No praxis. No new ideas. Just the same hypothetical stories and straw man opponents you come to expect from this dreck.

Lots of economic wisdom packed into just over 200 pages. A lot of this was already familiar from reading similar works but the section on unions, striking, and strikebreakers was new to me, and very interesting too. The fact that this book was originally published in the 1940s (then revisited by the author in the 1970s) yet the lessons still ring true today suggests that they are timeless, and that this will still be a book worth reading for many years to come.

“Economics, as we have now seen again and again, is a science of recognizing SECONDARY consequences. It is also a science of seeing GENERAL consequences. It is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some SPECIAL interest IN THE SHORT RUN, but on the GENERAL interest IN THE LONG RUN.”

For a book that was written so long ago, this book is amazingly relevant to today. It clearly explains how things like stimulus packages, government subsidies, nationalization, currency inflation etc., aren't, and can't be, magic solutions that fix the economy. It gives examples of times these types of things have been tried in the past and haven't worked and why they won't work today and will never work. If you are skeptical of the hundreds of billions of dollars being printed and shuffled around from tax payers to businesses, but can't quite explain exactly why it's wrong, this book is a great way to solidify your thoughts.

Awesome book. I highly recommend to anyone interested in a non-Keynesian view of economics. Hazlitt goes over inflation, trade, labor, foreign exchange, social programs, and many other topics. He uses logic to explain his viewpoints, shedding all emotion from his arguments. Many, many fallacies are explained away almost instantaneously.

This is a very easy read for this type of material. It is clear and concise, and does not take a college degree to understand.