The Free Market 5, no. 10 (October 1987)

The Institute thanks Margit von Mises for her gracious permission to print excerpts from this un-published talk. ed.

The Free Market 5, no. 11 (November 1987)

The Free Market 5, no. 12 (December 1987)

This special edition of the Free Market is devoted to Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt: Giant of Liberty

For more than seven decades, Henry Hazlitt has taught the economics of freedom. With pathbreaking theoretical work and a unique ability to communicate with the non-economist—shown forth especially in his Economics in One Lesson—he has both advanced Austrian economics and made it accessible to everyone.

Ever since Black, or Meltdown, Monday October 19th, the public has been deluged with irrelevant and contradictory explanations and advice from politicians, economists, financiers, and assorted pundits.

Let’s try to sort out and rebut some of the nonsense about the nature, causes, and remedies for the crash.

Myth One

It was not a crash, but a “correction.”

The Free Market 6, no. 2 (February 1988)

Compared with life in Western countries, where the socialist sector is sizable, life under total socialism is miserable.

The standard of living is so deplorable that, in 1961, the socialist East German government built a system of walls, barbed wire, electrified fences, minefields, automatic shooting devices, watchtowers, watchdogs, and watchmen, almost 900 miles long, to keep people from running away from socialism.

The Free Market 6, no. 2 (February 1988)

The Marxists call it “impressionism”: taking social or economic trends of the last few weeks or months and assuming that they will last forever. The problem is not realizing that there are underlying economic laws at work. Impressionism has always been rampant; and never more so than in public discussion of interest rates.

The Free Market 6, no. 3 (March 1988)

The hottest new topic in mathematics, physics, and allied sciences is “chaos theory.” It is radical in its implications, but no one can accuse its practitioners of being anti- mathematical, since its highly complex math, including advanced computer graphics, is on the cutting edge of mathematical theory.

The Free Market 6, no. 4 (April 1988)

The Federal Reserve—the U. S. government’s central bank—was schemed at a secret meeting in 1910 at J. P. Morgan’s hunting club on Jekyll Island, Georgia.

The Free Market 6, no. 5 (May 1988)

Mark Shields, a columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote of President Reagan’s “blind devotion to the doctrine of free trade.” If President Reagan has a devotion to free trade, it must be blind because he has been way off the mark. In fact, he has been the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover.

The Free Market 6, no. 5 (May 1988)

If the media tell us that “the opening of XYZ mill has created 1,000 new Jobs,” we give a cheer. When the ABC company closes and 500 jobs are lost, we’re sad. The politician who can provide a subsidy to save ABC is almost assured of wide-spread public-support for his work in preserving jobs.