 Human Action
It is a great book, intended for people who want to improve his knowledge about the deep meaning of economics.
 Politicians need to read this!
This is an amazing, in-depth book on economics that covers the free market, why socialism cannot work as an economic system for government, and why interventionism (what we currently have in the States) will also lead to financial hardships and collapse. This is a must read for anyone interested in the happenings of the market. I recommend that all politicians be required to read this book.
$20 are you kidding?
You can get this book for $20 over at the Mises Institute website.
20 Federal Reserve Notes and two months later and I cannot imagine a better way I could have spent that time or money.
If you have a high time preference for becoming smarter, understanding the market economy, refuting trite fallacies other annoy you with daily, and want a solid understanding of the repercussions that will come from your government's decisions, this book is not just going to be your n...it is going to be your (n - 1).
Buy it, read it, rock harder than the rest.
Excellent Anthology
Rather than review the content of Human Action, I'd like to expound how incredibly awesome this set is. It comes softback in four volumes (parts 1-3, part 4, and parts 5-7, including a fourth volume with an appendix, index, and glossary) within a sharp looking box. The quality of the set is on par with the American Library series, sans tissue paper thin pages. This is definitely a high quality set, and I've had many compliments as it sits on my bookshelf.
The content isn't aimed necessarily at the layman, but with the internet's help, I digested the 7 parts over 3 months. It is an incredible and insightful read that I recommend any Patriot, Historian, Economist, or God-Fearing American should read.
The title says it all
For those who are wondering just what exactly "Austrian economics" is and how it differs from the rest of economics, Mises' magnum opus' title pretty much explains it all: human action.
That is to say, Austrian economics is a school of economics that reaches its conclusions from a rational deductive examination of the implications of human action. Unlike other schools of economics, which insist that economic truth can only be discovered through empirical investigations, the Austrian School shows this to be wholly mistaken: we know that other things being equal people prefer the same good now as oppposed to in the future, other things being equal people prefer more of the good to less of the good, etc. When you take in the fact that scarcity and time (being a scarce good itself) are undeniable elements in the world, the whole of economics is deductive and the free market is demonstrably shown to be a system where prosperity explodes time after time (as it did during the Industrial Revolution, where despite certain feudal/statist distortions America and other countries went from largely agrarian economics with primitive tools and technology to one that had telephones, airplanes, etc. Just consider how much more technologically advanced society was in 1910 than in 1790, and yet this was just 120 years apart -- just a little more than a lifetime).
Human Action is better read before Murray Rothbard's titan treatise 'Man Economy and State' for the reason that Rothbard seems to assume readers are familiar with elements of Mises' views that he disagrees with (ex// the monopoly price/competitive price distinction) and Rothbard skips over some incredibly important material that Mises covers in the first 200 pages (ex// methodological individualism/methodological singularism vs. Marxian/racial polylogism, a critical part of the beginning of Human Action).
I would also recommend, for people who want to read this titanic work, that they read Henry Hazlitt's stunningly brilliant Economics in One Lesson first. That work helps readers begin to think like economists and see "the unseen" in every single action the government takes in intervening in the economy, something that Mises assumes the readers will already understand.
Absolutely essential. Mises feared that Austrian economics would fade out into obscurity after his death, but I don't think even he could have forseen the explosion in interest in the Austrian School in recent days. He can rest in peace knowing that his lifetime's prolific work, which was mostly UNPAID, was not in vain.
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