Henry Hazlitt

A staunch advocate and widely read explicator of the free market system, Mr. Hazlitt shrugged off the popularity of socialism in the 1930s as well the government pump-priming theories of John Maynard Keynes so fashionable in the post-World War II period.

Instead, he used his various journalistic platforms to educate readers about the "fallacies" of interventionist policies, whether restrictive tariffs, minimum-wage laws or Social Security. Relying on illustration and explanation rather than statistics, Mr. Hazlitt was a feisty iconoclast who rarely endeared himself to politicians.

In the best known of his 17 books, "Economics in One Lesson," he pointed out "the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy."

Originally published in 1946, the best seller was revised and republished (in 10 translations) in 1979, poised to assist--or be vindicated by--the rise of Reaganomics and free market thinking in the 1980s.

Self-educated as an economist, Mr. Hazlitt began his career as a business writer at The Wall Street Journal, following the same line of work at a series of New York dailies over the next decade.

In 1925, he became literary editor of the New York Sun and later at The Nation.

Although hand-picked in 1933 as H.L. Mencken's successor as editor of the American Mercury magazine, he left that post within a year to return to the economics beat--as an editorial writer for The New York Times. His "Business Tides" column remained a regular feature at Newsweek from 1946 until 1966.

Mr. Hazlitt never seems to have actually retired, writing articles well into his 90s, claiming he did it to "ward off senility."

He died in 1993.