Recommended Reading
The first book I ever read on economics was Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. Thereafter, I read everything by him I could get my hands on. Henry Hazlitt makes economics fun. Economics in One Lesson made reading economics not only fun but interesting, simple, and clear. One of the next books I read that caused me to fall in love with the subject was his fictional book, Time Will Run Back. It is a marvelous book of a young man that finds himself in the position of dictator of a command economy. It is a book about the rediscovery of capitalism.
Milton Friedman also made economics fun, interesting, and clear. His books Dollars and Deficits and Capitalism and Freedom are two that influenced me profoundly. Still, his A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, which he co-wrote with Anna Schwartz, helped win him a Nobel Prize and brought him recognition as a scholar. No one influenced economics more than Milton Friedman in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was to his great credit that he achieved acclaim academically as well as from the average American citizen.
Ludwig von Mises, the father of Austrian Economics, is my intellectual mentor. When it comes to the nuts and bolts of economics, von Mises is the source. His book, The Theory of Money and Credit, and his treatise, Human Action, provide the theoretical ammunition that allows us to understand the workings of an economy and the how and why of it. It is not fun reading, but it is indispensible to anyone ...
