mises.org ISBN: 978-1-933550-62-6The book is dedicated to the handful of people in the world who truly honor morality, principles, and ethics, consistently, regardless of personal agendas. Preface I FIRST BEGAN to learn about economics in college and from reading and studying the topic subsequently on my own. As my studies progressed, I thought I was on the path to learning how the world worked. But one day, while sitting at a café in Paris (where I was doing graduate work), the book I was reading introduced me to the great economist Ludwig von Mises and the so-called Austrian school, which I—like most people—had previously never heard of. 1 After studying free-market economics, I began to understand how the world really worked, and learned that all other explanations of economics could easily be proven incorrect. I soon began to understand how our nation’s economic policies in fact actually harm us. I learned that the economic concepts that I, like everyone else, had always thought straightforward and obvious, were completely opposite from what we all simply took on faith. I thought that price controls, wealth redistribution, and government regulation helped and protected people. I had no idea that these things actually harmed those it was intended to help. I further assumed that economic progress was a natural phenomenon: I didn’t understand that for over the tens of thousands of centuries that man had existed, improving standards of living had occurred only during a handful of those, and not at all consecutively. Moreover, I didn’t know that it was possible for us to cease progressing, at any time, and actually to lose all of the economic gains we have achieved. As I began to learn true economic cause and effect, I realized that almost everything our government does works against us, and that people unknowingly vote for policies that mak
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