Economic Indulgences : Old and New Debates on Welfare and Freedom

This paper was presented as the Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture at the Austrian Economics Research Conference, Ludwig von Mises Institute Auburn, Alabama. In this lecture, I look at a debate in the 1960s between Frank H. Knight, the subject of my new book (2016) in Palgrave Macmillan's Great Thinkers in Economics series, and Henry Hazlitt, memorialized by this lecture. I look at the dispute they had on welfare, freedom and power, which was an important debate then and now. I take Knight's observations and apply them to today's debate on inequality, and what I suggest are the economic indulgences referenced in my lecture title