The Economics of Illusion

L. Albert Hahn was one of the most highly regarded economists and bankers in Germany before the war but he was unknown in the US until this translation of his work appeared in 1949. He immigrated to the US in 1940. This book is his frontal attack on the Keynesian system, which he calls the economics of illusion. He shows how government spending creates a false prosperity, and never more than in wartime. He explodes many of Keynes's fallacies, and with great precision too since, it turns out, Hahn himself once advanced these same fallacies before he saw their errors. So he writes with the passion of a convert. Mises thought very highly of Hahn's work, and none other than Henry Hazlitt has written the introduction to this classic anti-Keynesian work.