The Balfour Declaration
Economics in Action
By Brian Balfour
Thales Press, 2022; 306 pp.
“Public” high schools are for the most part rotten to the core, and it is widely recognized, if not quite “a truth universally acknowledged,” that they need to be replaced. But what should students in private schools or homeschooling programs be taught? If we wish to rescue our young people from the socialist and “woke” propaganda inflicted on them in government institutions, it is essential that they have sound textbooks and other programs of learning. In the effort to provide these, no one has done as much as the renowned entrepreneur and friend of the Mises Institute Robert Luddy, who has established the Thales Academies, which are based on a classical curriculum.
One of the key subjects high school students ought to learn is economics. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out in Human Action, “All present-day political issues concern problems commonly called economic. . . . Everybody’s mind is preoccupied with economic doctrines.” Students must possess the basic concepts of economics that will enable them to understand the benefits of the free market and the errors of socialism and interventionism. But an obstacle stands in the way. Economics is commonly taught as a technical subject, putting it beyond the grasp of most students of high school age.
Brian Balfour, the senior vice president for research of the John Locke Foundation, has found the way past this obstacle, and the result is Economics in Action, the textbook he has written for the Thales Academies. The solution is to teach Austrian economics, which is based on simple, readily graspable concepts and has the additional advantage of being true. As Balfour explains, “Before discussing what economics is, it is important to point out a couple of things that economics is not: It is not a complex web of mathematical models. . . . Instead, economics is a social science studying the implications of human acts of choice. Properly understood, economics utilizes deductive logic to arrive at timeless ‘economic laws’ to provide an intellectual framework to understand the world around us. Indeed, this course will not involve the use of long math equations or countless and complex graphs. Economics begins with the basic axiom (a self-evident truth) that humans act, and employs deductive logic to construct the implications of that truth into many ‘economic laws’ which enable us to understand how the economy works” (emphasis removed).
The concept of action may be simple to grasp, but spelling out its many implications in a way high school students can understand is no easy task. Balfour ably accomplishes the job through patient exposition accompanied by judicious repetition; in doing so, he shows clear mastery of the relevant Austrian concepts. The book contains three sections: “Introduction to Economics,” “How an Economy Works,” and “Why Economics Matters.” In what follows, I’ll discuss a few key ins
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