By Caleb S. Fuller in mere economics — 17 Jan 2025

#FreeBookFriday: More Foundations of Mere Economics

Last week, Art posted some links to free books that form the foundations of our thinking in Mere Economics.

In that spirit, here are a few more.

Frederic Bastiat, Economic Sophisms. The book is a "pre-refutation" of the current embrace of protectionism. No economist wrote with as much verve and wit. Every protectionist justification comes in for a skewering.

Frederic Bastiat, Economic Harmonies. A masterclass in explicating how people "expand their options by cooperating," to borrow language from Mere Economics.

Frederic Bastiat, The Law. You can read this masterful political philosophy essay in a single sitting. It's responsible for Bastiat's name echoing down the ages. In my experience, no one walks away from The Law unchanged.

Bastiat:

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Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the tendencies of organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their agents form a part of the human race? Do they consider that they are composed of different materials from the rest of mankind? They say that society, when left to itself, rushes to inevitable destruction, because its instincts are perverse. They presume to stop it in its downward course, and to give it a better direction. They have, therefore, received from heaven, intelligence and virtues that place them beyond and above mankind: let them show their title to this superiority. They would be our shepherds, and we are to be their flock. This arrangement presupposes in them a natural superiority, the right to which we are fully justified in calling upon them to prove.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson. If someone will only read one book in economics, hand them this.

Donald Boudreaux and Randy Holcombe, The Essential James Buchanan. Get acquainted with one of the most philosophical Economics Nobel Prize winners and learn why he thought exchange was the main show of the social sciences.

David Henderson and Steven Globerman, The Essential UCLA School. Learn just how much we can grasp about the world by keeping our eye on which parties have the rights to do what in social interaction.

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism. Mises lays out the case for freedom as powerfully as anyone ever has. Succinct and eminently readable.

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism. A classic that demands regular revisits. About much more than socialism. Mises aims at explaining nothing less than "society" itself.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. Subjectivism makes sense in economics, but not elsewhere. Read That Hideous Strength for the argument in the form of a novel.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. As usual, the Prince of Paradox dazzles.

Chesterton:

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The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.

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