The Greatness of Henry Hazlitt
On Saturday, September 19, I will post the Conclusion of my book, Christian Economics in One Lesson. I started this project in late March.
It took Hazlitt six weeks to write Economics in One Lesson in early 1946. If he devoted 40 hours a week, that would have been about 240 hours. It took me under 100 hours to write my book. I had the advantage of having access to all of his book, and I also had the advantage of 69 years of materials that have been published since the time that he wrote his book. An enormous amount of material has been published.
the same year that Hazlitt wrote his book, Leonard Read started the Foundation for Economic Education, which was a tiny operation. There were no Washington Beltway think tanks that promoted free-market ideas.
Communications among libertarians barely existed. For that matter, there really wasn’t anything known as libertarianism. Conservatives in 1946 were mainly besieged holdouts of the late 1930’s political opposition of Franklin Roosevelt, but there was no developed conservative philosophy. There was no conservative magazine. The Saturday Evening Post did occasionally publish articles by free market advocates, but there was nothing ideological about that magazine.
In 1946, a conservative could hardly find materials to read. Today, he could not possibly read in a year more than a tiny fraction of the materials that are published every day on the Web.
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