The end of Newsweek’s 80-year run in print is being marked by its celebrated editor, Tina Brown, with wonderful stories that remind us of what a noble history the magazine has. There are profiles or mentions of many of the greats, from Osborn Elliott to Katharine Graham to Lester Bernstein, to Charles Roberts, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Francois Sully, and Eleanor Clift, to name but a few. All deserving of a share of the magazine’s glory. But we don’t mind saying that we missed seeing mention of the man we admire most among Newsweek’s heroes — Henry Hazlitt.

Hazlitt was the most radical of the pro-freedom columnists in the entire second half of the 20th Century. He was an autodidact in economics who became a giant of a journalist. He’d started at the Wall Street Journal as secretary to its editor, had worked at The New York Sun, where he was literary editor, and eventually found himself writing editorials on political economy for the New York Times. It was Hazlitt who foresaw that Bretton Woods would not work and was bound to become an inflation trap. The New York Times issued a string of his editorials warning of the catastrophe that was to come.

When, however, the Senate ratified the Bretton Woods Treaty, Arthur Hays Sulzberger called Hazlitt into his office, and announced that the Times could no longer carry on against the new monetary system. The Times’s loss of Hazlitt stands as one of the worst errors in the history of journalism. The man who had just delivered the Times one of its greatest scoops of prediction left its employ. He brought out his famous book “Economics in One Lesson,” and was taken in by Newsweek, where he wrote 971 columns over the next 20 years.

Hazlitt’s complete oeuvre for Newsweek has been brought out in an anthology called “Business Tides” by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, named after the Austrian economist of whose ideas Hazlitt was an expositor. In an introduction to the anthology, Paul Milazzo describes Hazlitt’s “stock and trade” as “exposing persistent economic fallacies” and recognizing, as his famous book did, “the long-term, secondary consequences of economic policies beyond the immediate benefits sought by pleading interests.”

How we could use Hazlitt on this day, when America has just stepped off the fiscal cliff and Congress is flailing around for a legislative course. How we could use a columnist like Hazlitt who could ensure that the fiscal frenzy was linked to the monetary question. On that, Hazlitt was an exponent of sound money and the classical gold standard. He recognized that inflation was a greater problem than unemployment, and, by Milazzo’s count, a third of his Newsweek columns dealt with the problem of inflation.

It started with his first sentence in Newsweek. “After much wavering, the Truman Administration was finally brought, months ago, to acknowledge that price control could not work without wage control.” It’s a devastating point, stated in the plain language he used in the one million words he wrote for Newsweek. That first column was called “How Stabilization Unstabilizes,” and warned that the government had got itself into a position where it would have to surrender to every strike.

It is just astonishing to read Hazlitt from the vantage of the current time, where — with a few exceptions — economics is rarely written about in the way he crafted his columns. He relied on facts instead of fulminating. He was the anti-Krugman. He wouldn’t denounce labor. He would just quote government statistics as showing that in the year of greatest corporate profitability, wages accounted for 61% of corporate distributions and profits but 9%.

Hazlitt was not scared of deflation. It is something to think about in an era of quantitative easing designed to keep the economy growing by making credit cheap and easy. In 1965, just before the plunge in the silver value of the dollar, Hazlitt wrote in Newsweek a column called “Do We Need More Money?” It is, he said, “certainly true that, if the money supply is not increased while the economy is expanding, prices must tend to fall. But a gradual fall of prices for this reason is to be welcomed rather than feared.”

What he pointed out is that prices “would be falling because the supply of goods was increasing. And real costs as well as money costs of production would be falling along with them. So profit margins (and therefore incentives to production and employment) would tend to remain relatively unchanged.” Of the alleged “shortage of gold” he wrote that it existed “only in one sense— that too much paper money has been issued against it, so that this paper money cannot be made freely convertible into gold at the old ratio. That is why so many people are asking for devaluation.”

Hazlitt’s run in Newsweek ended in 1966, five years before the world fell apart with the end of Bretton Woods. The post-war monetary system collapsed on exactly the issues Hazlitt predicted back when the treaty was being written, and we entered the era of fiat money that was his worst nightmare. His last warning in Newsweek was to define the “difficult problem we face” as being “how to mitigate the penalties of misfortune and failure without undermining the incentives to effort and success.” Hazlitt died in 1993. We can’t help thinking that President Obama, Congress, all of us would have had a better time of it had Newsweek’s greatest columnist still been at his typewriter.