ИПИ Библиотека

This high-school text, published in May 2000, is aimed at teaching the intelligent young reader how to think about economic problems in a manner consistent with the Austrian School tradition. Its chapters on action, preference, demand and supply, value theory, money, and price controls emphasize deductive logic, the market process, and the failures of government intervention.
As the only text of its kind, this book is engaging, funny, filled with examples, and never talks down to the student. It is perfect for homeschoolers, but every student, young or old, will benefit from it. Indeed, a student familiar with its contents will be fully prepared to see through the fallacies of the introductory economics texts used at the college level.

Why study economics?

Why, indeed? A good short answer is that you can’t get away from it. Almost everything you do involves economics. Why do people have to earn a living? Why do some people—heavyweight boxers, rock stars, and movie producers, for example—earn vastly more than bus drivers or policemen? What determines the price of a Big Mac, or, for that matter, a Mack truck? Whenever you have to deal with money or prices, you are talking about economics.
To paraphrase Monsieur Jourdain, a character in a play by the seventeenth-century French writer Molière, you have been speaking economics all your life.
But granted the pervasiveness of economics questions, why study them systematically? After all, we are all governed by the law of gravity—try jumping off a cliff sometime if you don’t think so—but does it follow that we have to study physics?
If people don’t understand the basic laws of economics, we are headed for disaster. You don’t have to understand much physics to know why it’s not a good idea to jump off a cliff; but an economy that runs well depends on enough people grasping some simple truths about how the price system works.
As we’ll see throughout this book, a sound economy depends on allowing people to act freely. If politicians interfere with the free market, or attempt to replace it entirely with socialism, we are in for trouble.

David Gordon

Dr. David Gordon is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He was educated at UCLA, where he earned his PhD in intellectual history. He is the author of Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Exploitation, Freedom, and Justice, The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, An Introduction to Economic Reasoning, and Critics of Marx. He is also editor of Secession, State, and Liberty and co-editor of H.B. Acton's Morals of Markets and Other Essays.

Dr. Gordon is the editor of The Mises Review, and a contributor to such journals as Analysis, The International Philosophic Quarterly,The Journal of Libertarian Studies, and The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.