I must have read this book a hundred times, no kidding. It is a great book, or rather, a great piece of writing. That said, it has nothing to do with economics. It should really be titled 'Hazlitt in One Lesson.' This man, armed with his rhetoric ammunition, is an absolute genius, and fells the members of his community with brutal, ruthless precision. The book goes on the offensive from the get go. From then on, its just hack, chop, thrust, pierce...quite amazing actually. Each time I read it, I feel like I've witnessed a battle of gladiators and in the end Hazlitt holds the lone sword thrust deeply into Keynes' heart.

There have been and will be multitudes who will take on Keynes. Studying at UChicago exposed me to the Lucas critique ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique ), in which Professor and Nobel laurate Robert Lucas uses the "econometric models aren't policy-invariant" device to bludgeon Keynesian thought. But then, that stuff is fairly deep, mathematical, and ergo, boring. You'd have to know what econometrics is, and what's policy invariant, and how changing the policy midstream will cause the parameters of your underlying econometric model to alter and so on....not exactly the sort of thing that'll charge you up. Hayek's critique of Keynesian thought is again fairly deep and requires thought.

What works for Hazlitt is the general dumbness and idiocy of the reader. The average reader of Hazlitt assumes that a nation is just like his house scaled by a magnitude of a billion, so if he as a householder is able to live within his means and balance his budget, the nation must also do the same, otherwise the economic policies of the nation are bogus and the economists are incompetent frauds. This is the same sort of reader who consumes pop-science. The same reader who thinks multivariable calculus is just high school arithmetic scaled by a million, and that graduate students working on real algebra in their 20s are really solving quadratic equations of the ax^2+bx+c type he solved in his teens, just with bigger numbers! You can't reason with such people. Or maybe you can, but I can't. So whenever I meet people who are taken with Hazlitt, I first check if they like Hazlitt as a sarcastic comic book or whether they actually believe everything they've read. If its the latter, I slowly back away and run for the hills.

One of the threads above says Hazlitt isn't out to educate you, rather he's out to convert you. I think it is neither. Hazlitt is pure comedy gold. He is out to entertain you, but he is so subtle and underplayed most readers interpret his antics literally and walk around chanting "The Broken Window Fallacy" as if it is some mathematical theorem. To actually think "the most important lesson about economics is: One must consider not just what is seen, but also unseen." is incredibly naive, plain silly and quite stupid, to be blunt. If that is all what economics was about, why, we'd all get our doctorates in econ and our Nobel too for that matter.

"One must consider not just what is seen, but also unseen" is just as vacuously empty as "good begets good" or "haste makes waste" or other catchy platitudes. You can spin these things to mean just about whatever you want. To say that's the most important lesson econ has to offer...Ha!