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A recent collection of Henry Hazlett's essays, The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt (with an introduction by Hans F. Sennholz) was reviewed by James Powell in 1993. Powell writes:

During history's darkest decades, from the reign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt through Jimmy Carter, journalist Henry Hazlitt was perhaps more successful than anyone else at conveying classical liberal ideas to a large audience — through 18 books and an estimated 10,000 editorials, columns and articles.

This satisfying new book, published by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), collects 30 of Hazlitt's articles originally published in their flagship publication, The Freeman, together with a bibliography by FEE scholar Bettina Bien Greaves, reprinted tributes by Edmund A. Opitz and Ludwig von Mises, and a charming memoir Hazlitt wrote almost three decades ago when he was just 70. He is a self-taught genius. His father died not long after he was born in Philadelphia, and his mother struggled with little money. Hazlitt went to a school for fatherless boys. He couldn't afford Harvard, so he enrolled at the College of the City of New York where tuition was free. Even so, he soon had to drop out and help support his family, starting with a stint at the Wall Street Journal. After several years of self-education, he moved on to other newspapers, then followed H.L. Mencken as editor of The American Mercury. Mencken remarked that Hazlitt "is one of the few economists in human history who could really write." By the 1940s, Hazlitt was writing columns and editorials for the New York Times.

Between 1946 and 1966, he wrote the weekly "Business Tides" column for Newsweek. I remember that back in my high school days, there were few places to turn for free market views, but I could always open Newsweek and see our guy "Harry" Hazlitt speaking as if from a mountaintop. He provided heart-felt encouragement for countless numbers of people like me.

Hazlitt's books included The Failure of the New Economics, The Foundations of Morality and Man vs. the Welfare State, but he became internationally famous for his little book called Economics in One Lesson. Written in 1946, while he was at the New York Times, Economics in One Lesson had an inauspicious start, as Hazlitt recalled in these pages last November. The publisher didn't promote it. The book was never offered by major book clubs. No celebrity endorsed it. University professors didn't assign it. Nor did many libraries buy it. Nonetheless, it quietly found a vast audience and went on to sell more than 1,000,000 copies. Economics in One Lesson has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portugese and Italian. It has probably done more to educate people about why free markets work and why laws backfire than any other single book. In addition, Hazlitt has done a great deal personally to help defend human liberty. When the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises fled from Hitler's Europe to an America where he was unknown, Hazlitt became his most passionate champion. He helped persuade Yale University Press editor Eugene Davidson to publish Mises' books. Hazlitt promoted Mises' most historic work, Socialism, in the pages of the New York Times. Later, Hazlitt told the world about Mises' epochal Human Action. In 1947, he joined Friedrich Hayek in Mont Pelerin, Switzerland to renew vital communications among classical liberals around the world.

In 1950, with Suzanne LaFollette and John Chamberlain, Hazlitt helped launch The Freeman, an influential fortnightly which was named after the luminous magazine of opinion Albert Jay Nock had published during the 1920s. Mises, Hayek, Frank Chodorov, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Wilhelm Roepke and other illustrious classical liberal writers all appeared in The Freeman, and it became an important postwar rallying point by the time it was taken over by FEE in 1955. Hazlitt served as a FEE trustee, writer and lecturer for years. The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt offers a splendid selection of his work. Although most articles were written years ago, they offer abundant insights about government problems which never seem to go away. For instance, Hazlitt chronicles the phenomenal proliferation of laws disrupting our lives... American legislative bodies from city councils to the U.S. Congress enact some 150,000 laws annually... the Federal Code of Regulations exceeds 120,000 pages... local regulations, Hazlitt notes, are every bit as complicated—the Boston building code alone is about 500 pages... Connecticut general statues run to some 3.5 million words. Of course, Hazlitt remarks with evident outrage, ignorance is never an acceptable excuse when peaceful citizens run afoul of these byzantine laws or regulations.

In his characteristically concise articles, Hazlitt covers tremendous ground. He explains the destructive effects of taxes, inflation, rent controls, price controls, minimum wage laws, trade restrictions and much more. He writes about key classical liberal thinkers like John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. Hazlitt, as this book will remind you, remains a great and beloved teacher of liberty.