AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS

Mises made, in my opinion, the single greatest economic breakthrough of the 20th century. He proved, with irrefutable logic, why socialism is inherently unviable, due to the impossibility of meaningful economic calculation in the absence of market-based prices. -- Mark Hendrickson, Economist

From Eric Dondero:

Another silly romantic comedy from Blockbuster this weekend, or a free market Economics text? Which will leave you feeling cheap, and which will leave you intellectually invigorated?

Mark Hendrickson, an economist who studied under one of the heirs of Ludwig von Mises Dr. Hans Sennholz, offers this list of the best of Von Mises at American Thinker:

In The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), Mises integrated money into the larger body of neoclassical marginalist thought; showed how inflation redistributes, rather than creates wealth; and laid the foundation for his and Hayek's future work on how central bank monetary policy causes the widespread "cluster of errors" that characterizes the boom-bust cycle.

In Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922), Mises made, in my opinion, the single greatest economic breakthrough of the 20th century. He proved, with irrefutable logic, why socialism is inherently unviable, due to the impossibility of meaningful economic calculation in the absence of market-based prices. His socialist critics claimed to have surmounted this difficulty by saying that socialist regimes could copy capitalist prices -- hardly a "triumph" for the alleged superiority of socialism if it is ultimately a parasite dependent on capitalism. Many tens of millions of human beings could have been spared untold grief, blight, poverty, suffering, and premature death in the wretched experiments with socialism that darkened the 20th century, if only Mises's insights and warnings had been heeded.

Mises's magnum opus is Human Action (1949). This book summarizes all of his vast economic understanding and synthesizes it into a comprehensive theory of (what else?) human action, called "praxeology." At a time when economics was becoming so fragmented and specialized that agricultural economists, for example, might have difficulty understanding international trade economists, Mises accomplished the intellectual equivalent of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again by developing the economic equivalent of the unified theory in physics.

Mises's fourth masterpiece is Theory and History (1957), a surprisingly readable examination of methodology that includes discussions of how both economic theory and the study of history demonstrate the superiority of free-market over government-planned economic action. (This book is the most accessible of "the big four" to the non-economist.)