Books

How prices, profits and losses steer scarce resources, explained in plain words with no graphs or equations. Sowell judges each policy by the incentives it creates and the results that follow, not by its intentions.

Hazlitt’s one lesson: trace a policy’s long-run effects on everyone, not only its short-run effects on one group. He applies it to tariffs, rent control, minimum wages and make-work schemes, starting from Bastiat’s broken window.

A short pamphlet arguing that law exists to protect life, liberty and property. When the law is used to take from some people and give to others, Bastiat calls it “legal plunder”.

Written in wartime Britain, it argues that central economic planning needs someone to decide whose goals come first, and that this power steadily erodes personal freedom. Hayek dedicated it “to the socialists of all parties”.

Friedman argues that economic freedom is a precondition for political freedom. He proposes school vouchers, a negative income tax and floating exchange rates, and questions occupational licensing.

Smith explains how the division of labour and ever-wider markets make nations rich, and attacks the mercantilist idea that wealth means gold. People pursuing their own gain, he argues, often serve the public better than planners could.

A treatise that builds economics from the logic of purposeful human choice. Mises argues that without market prices for factories, land and machines, a socialist planner cannot work out what production is worth.

Keynes argues that total spending in an economy can fall short and stay short, leaving people out of work for years. He concludes that government spending and cheap money can fill the gap when private demand fails.