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The recent disgraceful effort to portray the late economist W.H. Hutt as a racist prompted me to scour through my library in search of a book that I recall buying years ago at a used-book store in Boston – specifically, the slim 1986 volume edited by economist Morgan Reynolds titled W.H. Hutt: An Economist for the Long Run [2]. I found it!
This volume’s insightful first chapter – titled “Razing Keynes: An Economist for the Long Run” – was written by my former GMU colleague Tom Hazlett. On page 15 of Tom’s chapter we read this about Hutt, who spent much of his adult life living in South Africa:
So doggedly annoying were his economic and classical liberal attacks on apartheid in scholarly forums and the popular press that the white supremacist government was at one point moved to deprive Mr. Hutt of his travel visa.
Apparently, Hutt was so clever at disguising his racism as anti-racist efforts that he managed to hide his racism even from the white-supremacist government of South Africa!