![]() I would finally like to say a special thank-you to Sheldon Richman for having suggested this title as a release. This is a book that gets to the core of what makes economics wonderful. I wish now that the first book I had been given was Ballvé’s Essentials of Economics. Still, I stuck with the discipline until I finally bumped into the works of Hans Sennholz, Ludwig von Mises, and the whole Austrian tradition. Rather than dealing with recognizable forces at work in the word, it dealt with unreal mechanical postulates that abstracted too far from anything to do with human choice. It was a tutorial that covered the essentials of Keynesian theory. I walked into the head of the department’s office at Texas Tech University and asked him point-blank: What is economics? He said just as pointedly: It is the science that seeks the causes for why civilizations rise and fall and the material forces that are ultimately behind these great events. Finally I stumbled on this thing called economics. I looked through university catalogs randomly. When I was 17, I had a sudden realization that I wanted to study something new, something fresh, a discipline that I had not yet encountered, something that would appeal to all my interests (history, philosophy, arts) but allow them be applied in a new way. For this beleaguered generation of freedom-minded individuals assaulted on every side by trends toward centralization, this tutorial is truly the light. Its lessons are broad enough to apply in all times and all places. It is completely free of the tendency toward political posturing. It is, in many ways, the perfect tutorial in what economics is and what it implies about our world. The book does not require a great deal of time, but it covers a vast scope of topics. What Read had seen in this book others saw as well. ![]() It was a widely read primer on economics in the 1960s, read by champions of free enterprise who wanted to understand and promote that understanding. FEE distributed many thousands of copies, perhaps even many tens of thousands of copies. It was piety for truth that drove the decision. He saw the high quality of the work and decided to push it. Read would not be able to sponsor lecture tours by the author or otherwise turn him into a big star. He had no champions, money, or connections. He had no academic position in the United States. Ballvé was an unknown in the United States. He read through Ballvé’s work and decided that he would use the extremely scarce resources of the foundation to promote and distribute the book as widely as possible. He had a remarkably independent mind and a good eye for literary value. ![]() His passion was finding literature that propagated economics to the intelligent layman. Leonard Read (1898–1983) was head of the Foundation for Economic Education. Without this act of benevolence, this book would have likely been forgotten.īut there is another important act of entrepreneurship behind this work. This was one of thousands of incredible projects pushed by the Volker Fund in those years. The William Volker Fund, administered by its founder’s nephew Harold W. Two additional names deserve special mention in the tale of how it came to the English-speaking world. It sold very well and went into several editions. After Ballvé felt that he had most of his questions answered, he sat down to write this short book. Professor Ballvé was teaching in Mexico when he heard Mises speak. This edition helps to rectify the problem.īut let’s take a step back to the early years when it was first published. In his outstanding introduction, Art Carden speaks of the scandal that it is not better known. In times when economics is subject to vast political manipulation, when people have abused the science to push political agendas contrary to everything economics stands for, this book stands out as a clear, objective, and rational statement of the core of what economics teaches. ![]() And this book does economics extremely well. If it is done well, it applies in all times and places. The enduring power of this book is due to the enduring power of economic logic. ![]()
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