The Best Books for Business

One of the best books for quickly understanding the way the world works is the classic text by Henry Hazlitt: Economics in One Lesson.

Among many other valuable insights, he retells Bastiat's fallacy of the broken window.

Someone breaks a shopkeeper's window, creating work for the window repairman. The window repair creates a visible job.

But before the window was broken, the shopkeeper had a window and enough money to buy something else, perhaps a new pair of shoes or a new suit of clothes. Now he must spend that money on repairing his window, i.e. that which is seen.

What is not seen is the loss of business suffered by the man who makes shoes or the tailor who makes clothes. This is the kind of loss that is often overlooked by politicians who are hell-bent to create jobs.

Buy your own copy of Economics in One Lesson with a forward by Steve Forbes from the Mises Institute for only $14.