To revisit Henry Hazlitt's classic gem, “Economics in One Lesson,” is to gain fresh perspective on the relative impoverishment and mendacity of most of today's popular writing about economics. Hazlitt was a free-market thinker during the ascendancy of the New Deal, the antithesis of free-market thinking. First published in 1946, “Economics in One Lesson” is a timeless tome simply because the principles by which free markets operate do not change with technology or social conventions. Neither, alas, do the motives impelling governments and other forces that seek to subvert free markets. So, although the book's examples seem in some instances rather dated n mentioning typewriters and using prices of goods from the 1940s, for example n its message is as current as the housing "bubble" or the sub-prime "crisis."

Born in 1894, Hazlitt had little college education: a year and a half at City College of New York. But, as Steve Forbes writes in his foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of the book, "Hazlitt's insatiable curiosity about the way the world works led him, self-taught, to an understanding of basic economics astonishing in its breadth and scope....Perhaps the fact that he was relatively unspoiled by the influences of the academy allowed him to gain such profound insight into economics." No less a figure in classical economics than Ludwig von Mises hailed him as "our leader." H.L. Mencken, not known for profligacy in his praise of other writers, called Hazlitt "one of the few economists in human history who could really write."

Hazlitt's book pierces one economic fallacy after another, showing that attempts to tinker with markets for short-term political or social goals always wind up producing less net wealth for the entire society, although they may improve the lot of some at the expense of the general good. Price fixing, minimum wage laws, rent control, excessive taxation, and grand public works projects undertaken with the avowed aim of creating employment all are subjected to Hazlitt's withering analysis.

Hazlitt's overarching insight is that these fallacies continue to be supported because of "the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences." Hazlitt understood the deleterious effects of "special-interest group" pleading before the term came into use.

What is remarkable about the holder of these views is that he was an editorial writer for The New York Times, wrote on economics in The Nation -- then and now a leading organ of the political left -- and was a regular columnist for Newsweek from 1946 to 1966. There is no one today who so broadly disseminates the precepts of classical liberal economics.

Thomas Sowell comes perhaps closest to filling the position. Meanwhile, Hazlitt's old position at The New York Times is occupied today by Paul Krugman. Krugman, in contrast to Hazlitt, is an academically-trained economist (Yale undergraduate, Ph.D. from MIT) who teaches at Princeton. Krugman is resolutely leftist in his economic orientation (His current book is “The Conscience of a Liberal,” an obvious play on the Goldwater classic, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” that kicked off the modern conservative movement.), but what colors his views most strongly is that he is virulently infected with BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome). This malady produces the conviction that George Bush is alternately n or perhaps simultaneously n a hopeless simpleton and a masterful and cunningly evil schemer against all that is good. This belief in irreconcilable opposites has unhinged a good portion of the American left, which gives some of their writing a certain quality of madness.

But back to Hazlitt. He sounded the trumpet against the New Deal's depredations of the constitution and of classical economic theory. He was swimming against the current of his day, however, as Keynesianism was the reigning doctrine. But more recent examinations of the Great Depression have brought some surprising analysis.

Amity Shlaes is the author of the recently-published “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.” In the December 31 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Ms. Shlaes, in a column entitled "The New Deal Jobs Myth," has this to say about the grand public works projects of the Roosevelt administration: "... what really stands out when you step back from the picture is not how much the public works achieved. It is how little. Notwithstanding the largest peacetime appropriation in the history of the world, the New Deal recovery remained incomplete.

From 1934 on n the period when the spending ramped up n monetary troubles were subsiding, and could no longer be blamed alone for the Depression. The story of the mid-1930s is the story of a heroic economy struggling to recuperate but failing to do so because lawmakers' preoccupation with public works rather got in the way of allowing productive businesses to expand and pull the rest forward."

In short, the hogging of capital by a government fixated on public works projects had the effect of "crowding out" the more productive private sector that could have pulled the economy up. The result was that government programs actually extended the Depression beyond the cycle it otherwise would have followed. That it has taken so long to validate Hazlitt's view is largely a function of the media and the academy both being controlled by factions that do not find that analysis congenial. Somewhere Henry Hazlitt is smiling.

David Sanders is a Northsider.