I’ve been digging deep in the many free books of Austro-libertarian literature here on the Mises website, and I was wondering if anyone could share their favorite collection of books from that library.
Also, the reason for this is that I really need to catch up on my Austro-libertarianism science studies, so I’m looking for reading material that some of the experts on here favor that I can find on this website.
So you’re not looking for singular “books”, just “collections”?
Whichever one. I just need some learning material. I don’t want to be “ignorant of economics and voicing my opinions” to paraphrase someone popular here.
mises - socialism
nothing else you will ever need to know about actions of government.
What have you read?
You mean all of my Austro-libertarian readings in total?
Yup
Let’s see here:
The Revolution: A Manifesto
Anatomy of the State
Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government
The Rise and Fall of Society
How Privatized Banking Really Works
Pictures of the Socialistic Future
Let’s Abolish Government
Economics and the Public Welfare
Lessons for the young economist
Economics in One Lesson
Human Action
Theory and History
Man, Economy, and State
If you’re looking for a real economics crash course, anyway.
How was “Pictures of a Socialistic Future”, anyway?
Quite hard to follow from what I recall, but it got it’s message across to me that socialism is pure slavery.
And should I read them in that order?
And…Human Action is over 900 pages. Does the Sign of the Cross
Yep, and MES is 1500 pages if you include Power and Market 
The fact is that if you want to really understand AE that’s just about the only way to do it, and even then there’s some important elaboration upon the business cycle and certain nuances which you won’t understand unless you read Hayek, De Soto, and Bawerk. It’s quite a complicated subject and I’m sorry to say that there’s still really no intermediate works on the subject. Just a lot of advanced and beginner stuff. Don’t read what you don’t want to; reading the first two will give you a fairly good understanding of AE and Theory and History wouldn’t be too big a stretch from that point.
Uh huh. And was that you who just sent me a question about a short story of mine?
Nah, it’s that other guy named Neodoxy with the Alucard avatar
EDIT
1700th post
Oh. Well as I stated, I sent you an e-mail.
Bastiat Collection
Economics In One Lesson
Defending The Undefendable
Human Action (actually the size doesn’t matter, parts 1-3 and 5-7 are some of the most fun reading I’ve ever had. Part 4 is a tough slog)
everything by Hoppe
This might be an unpopular proposal but I heavily discourage reading Human Action or MES if you are just starting up economics. I would recommend picking up Principles of Microeconomics by Mankiw (older editions are available cheap). He’s by no means an Austrian, but he does a good job setting up the microeconomic framework. After you’ve read him you can go onto Human Action or MES. In fact I argue Human Action and MES become much more enjoyable once you realize the differences between them and the mainstream.
That’s just my opinion at least.
Wow really? I pretty much breezed through human action (with the exception of the chapter on money) and then as soon as I hit part six I had a lot of problems because I felt that the book got a lot more dense. Whenever Mises talked about taxes I wanted to tear my hair out.
Well Neodoxy, you stated that you started in this whole thing when you were 15 or something, so give us some background on how you joined up and got to where you are today.
^
You really want the full story?
@Mich
Hmm, I’ve never really heard that suggestion before. I agree that AE and ME complement one another, but I’m not so sure how one would interpret ME outside of an Austrian framework, while doing so inside an Austrian Framework is quite valuable.
HA is definitely “the Bible” of AE. However, I don’t think you need to read the whole of HA to understand the basic concepts of Austrian Economics. In fact, I would like to see a compressed version of HA (roughly 150 pages) by someone like Bob Murphy… it would be a tremendous contribution. Of course such a book could not even begin to defend against all the objections and counter-arguments but if someone is new and already “open” to AE, they don’t need to hear all the objections answered, they just need a brief and to-the-point overview.
If you read HA or MES, don’t forget the study guides.
Clayton -