Graham Hutton

Graham Hutton,(born April 13 1904; died October 14 1988 aged 84) was a free market economist, journalist and former British propagandist.

According to an obituary in the Guardian:

A graduate of the London School of Economics and of serveral continental universities, he was called to the bar in 1932 but did not take a legal career. Instead, he became a lecturer at the LSE at a time of intense public argument about policies to relieve the world depression. He soon tired of the academic platform and joined the staff of The Economist where his young friend, Geoffrey Crowther, had just replaced Walter Layton as editor. Journalism suited Hutton's temperament. He wrote with verve and conviction. His experience of France, Germany and the Danubian countries gave him an early insight into the fatal drift towards war. Nor did he neglect his reporting duties: it was Graham Hutton with one or two ecomomist colleagues, who discovered and smashed the famous plot to corner the world's supply of pepper which was then centred in London.

On the outbreak of war Hutton was given some work in the Foreign Office and then sent out to Chicago to open an office of the British Information Service. He was highly successful in making the British point of view in wartime known - and even understood - in the heartland of American isolationism. Back home he became an economic consultant to a British company but retained his freedom to write. With Geoffrey (later Lord) Crowther he published We Too Can Prosper (1953), an analysis of the reports of British productivity teams sent to the United States to compare industrial methods. The book exposed the weaknesses of British industry, and Hutton never ceased to speak and write on this subject, as late as 1980, and he never wavered in his view that salvation lay in unhampered private enterprise and freely working markets, rather than in any particular government policy. He made an exception: it was the job of the state to keep the currency sound. In Inflation and Society (1960), he warned of the destruction of social values wherever inflation has been allowed to slip out of control.