Bettina Bien Greaves put this volume together as a one-stop primer in economics that includes the best economic writing she had run across. In some ways, the choices are brilliant.
They are arranged by topic to cover the division of labor, prices, profits, property, competition, saving and investment, environment, antitrust, money and banking, advertising and marketing, and more.
Authors include Read, Mises, Bastiat, Greaves, Kirzner, Watts, Hazlitt, and many other writers.
Each essay is short and to the point. It still makes a great primer!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
General Introduction
1. Economics for Boys and Girls By Leonard E. Read
What Is Economics?
2. Something for Nothing? By Mark C. Schinnerer
3. The Broken Window By Henry Hazlitt
4. The Individual In Society By Ludwig von Mises
The Nature of the Individual—Values and Actions
5. The Biology of Behavior By Roger J. Williams
6. The Only Kind of People There Are By Roger J. Williams
7. The Unknown Quantity By Madelyn Shepard Hyde
8. Freedom’s Theory of Value By Leonard E. Read
Private Property and Exchange
9. Property By James Madison
10. Letter to His Stepbrother By Abraham Lincoln
11. Property Rights and Human Rights By Paul L. Poirot
12. Who Conserves Our Resources? By Ruth Shallcross Maynard
13. The War on Property By Paul L. Poirot
Social Cooperation and the Market
14. Free Will and the Market Place By Frank Chodorov
15. I, Pencil By Leonard E. Read
Prices, Pricing
16. Cost-Plus Pricing By Paul L. Poirot
17. Charging “All The Traffic Will Bear!” By Leonard E. Read
18. How Should Prices Be Determined? By Henry Hazlitt
Savings, Tools and Production
19. Letter to His Grandson By Fred I. Kent
20. Technological Status By John W. Campbell
21. Where Karl Marx Went Wrong By Samuel B. Pettengill
22. The Great Mistake of Karl Marx By Benjamin F. Fairless
23. The Role of Savings By Brian Summers
24. Tools By Jasper E. Crane
25. The Liberation of Women By Bettina Bien Greaves
26. Industrialism: Friend or Foe? By V. Orval Watts
27. The Economic Role of Saving and Capital Goods By Ludwig von Mises
The Entrepreneur and the Profit and Loss System
28. If Men Were Free to Try By John C. Sparks
29. “For the Good of Others” By Leonard E. Read
30. Food From Thought By Charles W. Williams
31. Windfall Profits By Robert G. Anderson
32. The Elite Under Capitalism By Ludwig von Mises
33. Profits By Hans F. Sennholz
34. Why Speculators? By Percy L. Greaves, Jr.
Labor, Wages and Employment
35. Bargaining By Paul L. Poirot
36. Collective Bargaining Wrong in Principle By John W. Scoville
37. How Wages Are Determined By Percy L. Greaves, Jr.
38. Jobs For All By Percy L. Greaves, Jr.
39. Wages and Productivity By W. M. Curtiss
40. Competition, Monopoly and the Role of Government By Sylvester Petro
41. The Economics and Politics of MY JOB 122 By Ludwig von Mises
Money, Credit and Banking
42. Million Dollar Dream By Employers' Assn. of Chicago
43. Not Worth a Continental By Pelatiah Webster
44. The Value of Money By Hans F. Sennholz
45. The Gold Problem By Ludwig von Mises
46. How Much Money? By Percy L. Greaves, Jr.
47. Back to Gold? By Henry Hazlitt
48. Eternal Love By Lawrence Noonan
Competition, “Big Business,” and Monopoly
49. The Cow in the Apartment By Burton Rascoe
50. Freedom to Shop Around By Hart Buck
51. Six Misconceptions About Consumer Welfare By Joel Dean
52. Is Economic Freedom Possible? By Benjamin A. Rogge
53. The Phantom Called “Monopoly” By Hans F. Sennholz
54. Advertising By Israel M. Kirzner
Interregional Trade
55. The Candlemakers’ Petition By Frederic Bastiat
56. Free Trade: Domestic/Foreign By Dean Russell
57. On Foreign Trade By David Ricardo
58. Foreign Investment vs. Foreign Aid By Henry Hazlitt
59. Restrictions on International Trade By W. M. Curtiss
60. The Failure of International Commodity Agreements By Karl Brandt
History of Economic Thought
61. The Formation and Function of Prices By Hans F. Sennholz
62. The Consumer Theory of Prosperity By John Stuart Mill
63. Of the Demand or Market for Products By Jean Baptiste Say
64. Marx’s View of the Division of Labor By Gary North
65. The Fallacy of “Intrinsic Value” By Gary North
66. The Man Who Answered Marx By Dean Lipton
Capitalism/The Hampered Market/Socialism
67. A King of Long Ago By Lewis Love
68. The Communist Idea, 1 By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
69. The Communist Idea, II By Earl Browder
70. A Lesson in Socialism By Thomas J. Shelly
71. The Tale of the Little Red Hen By W. A. Paton
72. The Beetle and the Centipede By W. A. Paton
73. Not Yours to Give By David Crockett
74. Intervention Leads to Total Control By Gustavo R. Velasco
Economic History
75. Food Control During Forty-six Centuries By Mary G. Lacy
76. How to End Poverty By Dean Russell
77. American Communism By Percy L. Greaves, Jr.
78. Facts About the “Industrial Revolution” By Ludwig von Mises
79. Progress or Regress? By Hans F. Sennholz
Summary
80. Hello! By Joan Wilke
81. Free Market Disciplines By Leonard E. Read
Glossary
Index of Authors