14 COMMENT
JUNE 09, 2018 THE STAR
WWW.STLUCIASTAR.COM
Confucius: Of Words It (Or Why We And A No
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House opposition leader Philip J. Pierre: Several months ago he promised to settle the matter of the meaning of “as soon as convenient” in the courts. Little has been heard on that in recent times!
omething I read or heard someone say on TV (rest assured it was not local television!) sent me searching for Henry Hazlitt. It turns out he was a self-taught economist who popularized the subject as a journalist and wrote a best-selling book about it: Economics in One Lesson. One esteemed critic declared it the best of Mr. Hazlitt’s seventeen books, “unstinting in its praise of free markets. In the simplest language, rarely citing statistics, he laid out what he called the fallacies of regulating economic activity—like trying, for example, to raise wage levels through minimum wage laws or union bargaining.” Mr. Hazlitt, who died at age 98, having lived seven years in a hospital, also wrote: “Fallacies when they have reached the popular stage, become anonymous anyway. The subtleties or obscurities to be found in the authors responsible for propagating them are washed off.” According to his New York Times obituary, Hazlitt’s earlier mentioned 222-page book sold more than 600,000 copies. Considered by several
current luminaries “one of the most brilliant intellectuals of our century,” Henry Hazlitt also published in 1916 the tutorial Thinking As A Science, from which I’ve lifted the following: “A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary, and the greater one’s awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one’s thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.” I recalled the above-quoted passage on Wednesday as Calixte George—not to be confused with the erudite former president of the Saint Lucia Senate, who was at different times responsible for the Kenny Anthony government’s agriculture, communications and the police portfolios—sought for the second consecutive time to verbally wrestle Timothy Poleon into the dirt of local politics. It seems Calixte George, Kenny Anthony’s once upon a time political attaché and speechwriter, was far from satisfied with his performance on Tuesday’s Newsspin and so he called the following day, determined
