Lew Rockwell's parrot here...

Reasons to read Economics In One Lesson (from Three National Treasures, by Lew):

If Hazlitt were followed, interventionist politicians and their intellectual bodyguards in the academic world would be unemployed. If it's not bad enough that he defied the economics establishment, his airtight case for the free market is accessible to the layman, and that's anathema to the economics establishment. Thumb through any issue of a top economics journal and you'll know why Hazlitt's book is considered heretical. Not because it doesn't make sense, but because it does; not because it isn't logical, but because it is; not because it isn't true to life, but because it is. Translate their jargon into English, and we find most economists beginning with such axioms as "let's assume everybody knows everything" or "nobody knows anything" or "people never change their minds" or "all goods are identical." Men and women are stripped of their individuality to make them fit into mechanistic models, and the economy is seen as static, or at best a series of shifting static states, without elaboration or the process of change. Deductions from such axioms must, of course, be false.

Hazlitt, like Mises, starts with the assumption that individuals act, that they do so with a purpose, and that as conditions change, their plans change. He makes no separation between "microeconomic" and "macroeconomic," terms commonly used to give the impression that different principles and laws apply to the whole economy than apply to individuals. So that while it may be justified to talk about purposive action, decisions on the margin, and subjective valuations at the individual level, this is of no relevance for the macro-managers in government.

But Hazlitt is a methodological individualist, and thus recognizes that the economy must be analyzed from the standpoint of individual action. Most economists are notorious justifiers of special-interest legislation because they ignore what Hazlitt so eloquently charts in Economics in One Lesson: the unseen and long-run effects of government policy. To Hazlitt, as an Austrian school economist, "economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

I'd be perfectly willing to mail you mine. Or read it here, or download the pdf here.