Economics in One Lesson

Henry Hazlitt was an American journalist. He was born on November 28, 1894, in the US state of Pennsylvania. For a time he attended City College in New York, but left without taking a degree, beginning his career in journalism at The Wall Street Journal shortly afterwards. He served in the Air Service during World War I and then returned to journalism, working as an editor of various publications such as The New York Evening Mail, The New York Sun, and The Nation during the 1920s and 1930s. He eventually began writing a financial column for The New York Times in the 1930s. After writing for the Times for over a decade, he moved to Newsweek and also edited The Freeman.

Throughout his life, Hazlitt strongly critiqued the inflationary practices of the New Deal and became an advocate for hard currency, a macroeconomic theory that separates reliable and stable currencies from volatile ones. Alongside fellow Classical economists such as Ludwig Von Mises of the Austrian School of Economics, Friedrich Hayek, and Ayn Rand, Hazlitt promoted laissez-faire capitalism and the idea that markets, if left alone, regulate themselves in a way that is ultimately beneficial for the economy as a whole. Apart from Economics in One Lesson, he was also the author of other works on economics, such as The Failure of the New Economics (1959), Man vs the Welfare State (1969), and The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It (1978). In 1946, he was one of the founders of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a libertarian American think tank dedicated to opposing New Deal policies such as social security and the minimum wage. FEE remains active to this day.

Hazlitt died on July 9, 1993, in New York City. He remains an influential figure in libertarian and conservative economic thought, and Economics in One Lesson remains his most famous work.