Gene Epstein, writing in Barron’s ($), recommends two Austrian books this week:
For a challenging but fascinating work, try Marx to Mises (1992), by David Ramsay Steele; it bears the subtitle, Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation, where “post-capitalist society” refers to socialism and communism.
The book is about the “calculation debate” -- the question of whether a post-capitalist society can find a way to allocate goods and services in some rational fashion. The story might seem too stale to be worth another book-length treatment. But Steele digs up intriguing details that at least I didn’t know -- for example, that Marx never had a concept of “socialism” -- and makes his argument in prose that is usually clear and riveting.
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The best antidote I know to the numbing effects of the standard textbooks on economics is Gene Callahan’s Economics for Real People: An Introduction to the Austrian School (2002).
The first half of the book sets forth basic principles; the second shows how the myriad ways of interfering with the market make matters worse, sometimes much worse.
Callahan cites the “health-care crisis” as a prime example of how “the problems resulting from one intervention tend to lead to calls for other interventions to fix those problems.” While the hated HMOs [health-maintenance organizations] are generally viewed as creatures of capitalism, these strange entities are just a response to the soaring costs arising from the government-instituted system of third-party payments.
“We do not see AMOs in the automobile industry or CMOs in the computer business,” observes Callahan.
