The Lesson Restated

Economics,, as we have now seen again and again, is a science of recognizing secondary consequences. It is also a science of seeing general consequences. It is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some special interest in the short run, but on the general interest in the long run.

But in the course of specific illustration we have found hints of other general lessons; and we should do well to state these lessons to ourselves more clearly.

In seeing that economics is a science of tracing consequences, we must have become aware that, like logic and mathematics, it is a science of recognizing inevitable implications

It is the "dismal science" because it is deadly boring to study in college. Dynamic go-getters haven't the time nor inclination for it. For that reason men who run for and attain the presidency are almost all unversed in the subject and do not know how money works. Reagan was an exception. He had his degree in Economics. From Reagan and that knowledge we got a quarter century of economic boom. The US has had only three presidents since the War Between the States who understood it, Reagan, Coolidge, and Cleveland. And Kennedy needed a gimmick and listened to the right economists and we got the Kennedy Boom. The Roaring Twenties and Coolidge were followed by Hoover and the choking off of world trade which stemmed from his beloved Smoot Hawley Act which brought us a panic and recession which Hoover tried to turn into a Depression and which FDR succeeded in doing.

Read Hazlitt's little book. You may disagree with what you read but you will never be mystified again by claims of economic or even social cures emanating from Washington or savior wannabes.

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