Time Will Run Back

Time Will Run Back, by Henry Hazlitt (Arlington House, $6).

Assuming a world as thoroughly collectivized as Marxist ideologues would like to make it—what might happen? Personal liberty and enterprise would have vanished, poverty and famine would be the ordinary _ citizen’s expected lot, all traces of the market system would be not only suppressed but expunged from memory. The only possible way back would be a groping effort to reconstruct free enterprise through logical rigor, trial and error, comparative analysis of incentives. Such an effort is the theme of Hazlitt’s novel, a Looking Backward in reverse whose non-brainwashed hero is thrust by accident into leadership of the Communist empire. Through gradual experimentation and long Socratic discussion with his second-in-command, the new leader rights the deficiencies of a creaking Marxist economy through private barter, a free pricing system, a gold standard currency, and private ownership of the means of production. Among the topics analyzed with the clarity for which Hazlitt is famous are inflation, monopoly, “fair prices,” helping the impoverished, and profits—discussions which gain additional force through juxtaposition of “new” free enterprise with the demonstrated failures (drawn from the real experience of the Iron Curtain countries) of collectivism. A reissue of a volume published in 1951 as The Great Idea, the book is an excellent introduction to the basic elements of economics.

ME

About the Author

M. S. Evans

Featured Tags

Time Will Run Back, by Henry Hazlitt (Arlington House, $6).

Assuming a world as thoroughly collectivized as Marxist ideologues would like to make it—what might happen? Personal liberty and enterprise would have vanished, poverty and famine would be the ordinary _ citizen’s expected lot, all traces of the market system would be not only suppressed but expunged from memory. The only possible way back would be a groping effort to reconstruct free enterprise through logical rigor, trial and error, comparative analysis of incentives. Such an effort is the theme of Hazlitt’s novel, a Looking Backward in reverse whose non-brainwashed hero is thrust by accident into leadership of the Communist empire. Through gradual experimentation and long Socratic discussion with his second-in-command, the new leader rights the deficiencies of a creaking Marxist economy through private barter, a free pricing system, a gold standard currency, and private ownership of the means of production. Among the topics analyzed with the clarity for which Hazlitt is famous are inflation, monopoly, “fair prices,” helping the impoverished, and profits—discussions which gain additional force through juxtaposition of “new” free enterprise with the demonstrated failures (drawn from the real experience of the Iron Curtain countries) of collectivism. A reissue of a volume published in 1951 as The Great Idea, the book is an excellent introduction to the basic elements of economics.