A Book Review by Andy Duncan
In the classic novel King Solomon’s Mines, the witch Gagool leads a group of Englishmen, including the legendary Allan Quatermain, into an ancient treasure room deep inside a mountain carved within solid rock and chock full of gold, diamonds, and other splendid jewels.
To feel like Quatermain yourself, to discover an almost endless stream of flawless intellectual gems, and to experience writing of the highest classical quality, there’s little need to find a time-and-space machine to travel back to nineteenth century Africa. All you need do is get hold of a copy of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, still the main hidden doorway into the secret treasure room of Austrian economics.
It is a particularly useful first book for anyone who has spent the last few years in a foggy miasma of Keynesian or Monetarist economics, which together form the state-sponsored mainstream of most economics schools, mainly because they award the state a sacred role in controlling all of the major levers of economic power.
But something has gone very badly wrong with the mainstream economics schools, who seem incapable of understanding just what happened in 2008, and whose only policy solutions seem to consist of doing more of the same, to solve the seemingly unknowable problems of economic collapse.
Fortunately, the Austrian School does have a clear idea of what happened in 2008, and does have a consistent framework of ideas of how to get back to a functioning and steadily expanding economy, based upon reality and truth, rather than fictitious state smoke and lying political mirrors.
But to reach that framework, it may first be necessary to clean out any economic shibboleths that may have infected your mind, pumped in through the mainstream education system, media system, and government system, which is the main ‘ground clearance’ task of Economics in One Lesson. Read More Here
