Hazlitt and Keynes: Opposite Callings [This talk was delivered
at the Mises Circle in Houston, Texas, on January 22, 2011. The
audio of this speech is available here.] John Maynard Keynes was
born in 1883 and died in 1946. Henry Hazlitt was born in 1894,
eleven years after Keynes, and lived much longer, until 1993.
Their lives and loyalties are a study in contrast, and mostly of
choices born of internal conviction, in Hazlitt's case, or lack
thereof, in Keynes's case. Keynes became the most famous
economist of the 20th century and the guru-crank whose work has
inspired thousands of failed economic experiments and continues
to inspire them today. He is the Svengali-like figure who
implausibly convinced the world that saving is bad, inflation
cures unemployment, investment can and should be socialized,
consumers are fools whose interests should be dismissed, and
capital can be made nonscarce by driving interest rates to zero
— thereby turning the hard work of many hundreds of years by
economists on its head. Ke