FMD.
$499.34 for Kates book

That’s from Chris, at the comments on Told Ya So. It’s the kind of pricing that seems, to me, aimed at discouraging anyone from buying a copy. On the other hand, it is a copy of the first edition which is no longer being published so perhaps it has now become a classic and the price reflects its scarcity. It is also the hardback. The third edition is only $254.17, but that too is the hardback. However…

And then from the Elgar website.

Free Market Economics, Third Edition

An Introduction for the General Reader

Steven Kates, Associate Professor of Economics, School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

If you are genuinely interested in what is wrong with modern economics, this is where you can find out. If you would like to understand the flaws in Keynesian macro, this is the book you must read. If you are interested in marginal analysis properly explained, you again need to read this book. Based on the classical principles of John Stuart Mill, it is what is missing today; a text based on explaining how an economy works from a supply-side perspective.

In Association with the Institute of Economic Affairs

Look inside

Extent: 480 pp

Hardback Price: £115.00 Web: £103.50

Publication Date: 2017

ISBN: 978 1 78643 138 7

Availability: In Stock

Paperback Price: £35.00 Web: £28.00

Publication Date: 2017

ISBN: 978 1 78643 140 0

Availability: In Stock

So before I go on, let me quote Samuel Johnson:

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

I have published around a dozen books but I doubt I have ever made more than a pittance on the lot of them. But whatever I have made on the books, it is more than I have made from this blogging. There is just the pleasure of it.

So let me give you the opening from the Preface to the second edition which will help explain the purpose of the book.

I wrote my Free Market Economics: An Introduction for the General Reader in early 2009, just as the various stimulus programmes were being put into place across the world to deal with the economic consequences of the Global Financial Crisis; it was written in white heat between February and May as the text for the course I was teaching in Economic Analysis for Business. What drove the book to completion was my dismay at the return of Keynesian theory and policy as the guide to recovery. My assumption at the time was that my book would be one of many such texts written in response to the devastation that would inevitably be brought on by the stimulus. What is to me quite astonishing is that this book, even in this second edition, remains the only book of its kind. I fear that, given the years of teaching nothing other than Keynesian theory, most economists can no longer see what the problem with modern macroeconomics is and why a Keynesian demand-side stimulus could not possibly have worked.

What makes this book different is that the macroeconomics is not just pre-Keynesian and not just un-Keynesian but actively anti-Keynesian. The book also explains Keynesian theory, of course, since it is impossible to teach economics without discussing modern macroeconomics as it is currently taught. Nevertheless, anyone interested in understanding the classical pre-Keynesian theory of the cycle, which focused on a very different explanation for recessions and an equally different path to return an economy to rapid rates of growth and low unemployment, will find no other introductory book to guide them in what I think is the right direction. Let me merely note that free market does not mean laissez-faire.

I wrote the book in twelve weeks during the first semester in 2009 because I was so disgusted at the return of Keynesian economics to front and centre following the GFC. It remains, so far as I know, the only anti-Keynesian economics text in the world. It is therefore, in my view, as Art Laffer wrote, the only economics text in the world that will explain how an economy actually works.