Acceptance houses, 12, 13

Acceptance rates, 193 ff; during crash, 209. See FEDERAL RESERVE POLICY

Agricultural Adjustment Act, 334, 339

Agriculture, 18-19, 23, 61, 64, 66-7; exports, 89; 113-6, 119; effect of foreign loans, 178, 182; Federal Farm Board, 221, 222, 269; farm mortgages, 307; in World War II, 526

Aldrich, W. W., 284, 449, n.

Aldrich-Vreeland Act, purpose of, 17, 41

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due the more than 50 authors, living and dead, whose thoughts and efforts made this volume possible. Special appreciation is given the individuals and publishers who originally granted permission to the Foundation for Economic Education (referred to in this basic reader as FEE) to reproduce the many titles appearing here from its early pamphlets and other publications—Ideas on Liberty, The Freeman and Notes From FEE. Hopefully all persons and organizations who contributed have been adequately recognized in the footnote identifying each essay.

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

The Foundation for Economic Education is a nonpolitical, nonprofit, educational institution. Its senior staff and numerous writers are students as well as teachers of the free market, private ownership, limited government rationale. Sample copies of the Foundation s monthly study journal, The Freeman, are available on request.

Published 1975

ISBN-0-910614-56-3

The 81 readings in this basic reader have been selected to accompany and to supplement free market economics: a syllabus. They are arranged here in broad subject categories so that they form in effect a “course of study” in and of themselves. A substantial understanding of free market economics may be gained by reading this volume systematically from beginning to end. However, anyone seriously interested in a full and logical explanation of the theories illustrated by these readings should also refer to the syllabus.

Preface

General Introduction

1. Economics for Boys and Girls By Leonard E. Read

What Is Economics?

2. Something for Nothing? By Mark C. Schinnerer

3. The Broken Window By Henry Hazlitt

4. The Individual In Society By Ludwig von Mises

The Nature of the Individual—Values and Actions

5. The Biology of Behavior By Roger J. Williams

6. The Only Kind of People There Are By Roger J. Williams

7. The Unknown Quantity By Madelyn Shepard Hyde

Leonard E. Read

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Proverbs 22:6

Time and again we have been asked to devise economic instruction for the youngsters, the thought being that it’s the oncoming generation that counts. And, just as often, we have shaken our heads, pleading ignorance of how to go about it.

Mark C. Schinnerer

The writer of this editorial practices what he preaches. I know because I am well acquainted with him and his career. He has always given at least as much, and usually more, than he expected to receive. He is a stalwart American citizen. It is fortunate for all of us when men like Mark Schinnerer occupy important positions of leadership, especially in education. Dr. Schinnerer is a valued member of the National Advisory Council for Scholastic Magazines.

—John W. Studebaker Chairman, Editorial Board

Roger J. Williams

Biologically, each member of the human family possesses inborn differences based on his brain structure and on his vast mosaic of endocrine glands—in fact, on every aspect of his physical being. Each of us has a distinctive set of drives—for physical activity, for food, for sexual expression, for power. Each one has his own mind qualities: abilities, ways of thinking, and patterns of mental conditions.

James Madison

This term, in its particular application, means “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.”

In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right, and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.

In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandise, or money, is called his property.