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Sometimes you stumble across a book that will simply be the best for an entire year, even if the year has just begun. In early 2008 I read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, an excellent historical piece about the history of fascism in the 1900s.
I just finished reading historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr’s book, Meltdown. Since 2009 will likely be remembered at the year that the State attempted to conquer our economic woes, and since it happens to be the first economics book on the market that explains in layman’s terms what has been going on over the past few years and decades, I’m declaring it the 2009 Book of the Year. Why? Because it can speak to all levels of economic understanding and still serve its purpose, which is to educate the reader about basic economic and historical facts. It also points to the fact that the Austrian school of economic theory predicted this (and other) crashes, and that perhaps those who were prophetic enough to explain how and why such crashes occur, we should at least hear their advice when it comes to public policy.
If you believe that what we are currently experiencing is a “failure” of the free market; if you believe that government regulation was absent during the past decade or beyond; if you believe that intervention, bailouts, and “doing something” will actually help us; if you believe that government has the means to save us; Meltdown is for you to read. It’s under 200 pages, and it is well worth the time. I’ll even let you borrow mine.
