Quote from: niemivh on July 12, 2011, 06:46:24 AM

I just finished reading "Economics in One Lesson". Oh boy. The fact that anyone can gobble that swill down without as much as a burp of mental indigestion is frankly stunning. I read it due to someone's rave revues on this forum to which they basically revered this book as a bible of sorts.

There are only a few chapters with any worthwhile arguments to salvage, some of those chapters (and there weren't many) I truly liked the principle message of, but even those he had to pack as much polemical mouth-frothing vitriol in as he could, much of which felt manic, like he couldn't even finish a thought without bursting out in Strangelovian fashion. The chapters were also stacked with the most obvious straw man arguments you could possibly dream up. It's as if his sole source for counter-arguments was someone who read a bad translation of Keynes into a non-native language, had a lobotomy, and were given opiates and hallucinogens prior to their interview with Mr. Hazlitt.

The naked class warfare of this book was so blatant it's amazing that people can read this thinking that it's some disinterested objective view by a scholarly hermit completely removed from the system he seeks to influence, which due to the reverence in which it was previously addressed lead me to believe that some believe this not far off from the truth. No sooner than you might give him the new chance of being objective and fair in the next chapter he bursts into another polemic. The lack of objectivity and disingenuous nature actually put this book the borderline of being a manifesto rather than any actual work of academia. The words "liberty", "freedom" and other slogans are smattered about the pages to keep the average libertarian plodding along thinking that the system he promotes would somehow be in any of their best interests to which they are woefully mislead.

But to be fair, it is nowhere as bad as "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman.

This could probably be edited in such a way to be self-descriptive.

bjorn

Posts

Merits