"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
Henry Hazlitt (November 28, 1894 – July 8, 1993) was a libertarian philosopher, economist and journalist for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, and The American Mercury, among other publications. In childhood his family’s finances were meager, his father having died when Henry was an infant, and he left college after a year and a half to become a journalist. He was credited with bringing Austrian economics to an English-speaking audience. Hazlitt was a prolific writer, authoring some 25 books in his lifetime.
Hazlitt is well-known for his book Economics in One Lesson, but he also wrote other books, among which are a major work on ethics, The Foundations of Morality, and The Failure of the New Economics, a detailed chapter-by-chapter critique of Keynes’s “General Theory” (of which he wrote that he was “unable to find in it a single doctrine that is both true and original. What is original in the book is not true; and what is true is not original.”)
Hazlitt was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine.
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."