Economics a hot topic in Meltdown: today's hard times are prompting people to learn more about the forces that drive our economy, and Thomas Woods' Meltdown offers an entertaining way to do just that.(Book review)

Meltdown: A Free-market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2009, 194 pages, hardcover, $27.95.

The last few years have been kind to the freedom cause, at least if book sales are any evidence. First came Thomas Woods' debut in popular nonfiction, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which rose to become the number two bestseller on Amazon.com, and occupied the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for many weeks. Then Congressman Ron Paul published The Revolution: A Manifesto in the wake of his presidential campaign. The concise, elegantly written book was a number one bestseller, and has done much to publicize Dr. Paul's long-standing campaign for freedom and constitutionally limited government.

Now Thomas Woods has hit a second home run with the not-so-concisely titled Meltdown: A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Meltdown, to which none less than Congressman Paul contributed the foreword, debuted at #16 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and, at the rime of this writing, occupies the #14 slot after four weeks.

Warming Up to a Cold Topic

Nor is Meltdown undeserving of its popularity. Its author, a Harvard and Columbia-trained historian by credentials, has produced a best-selling, mass-appeal book on Austrian "free market" economics--a feat that the Mises and the Rothbards of the past, and the Hoppes and Hulsmanns of the present, have never managed to accomplish. This is not to diminish the achievements of the Austrian school or any of its proponents, who for more than a century have defied the prevailing statist winds of economic theory to erect and defend the magnificent edifice of modern free-market, laissez-faire economics.

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In this writer's view, it is a terrible shame that so few, even among the partisans of liberty, are willing to make the effort to read Mises' Human Action or Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State, let alone the dozens of other luminous offerings by these and other Austrian economists. But few are disposed to read a book of 800 or a thousand pages on any subject, let alone economics. The closest thing to an Austrian bestseller until now is Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom, which is less an economic study than a work of political philosophy, and withal not one of Hayek's most ideologically consistent offerings. Were Henry Hazlitt or even Leonard Read alive today, gifted as they were with clean, epigrammatic prose, they might have written the likes of Meltdown.