| | I would recommend Rothbard's "Power and Market," for starters. He is usually considered Von Mises' intellectual heir, and his writing style is very clear. His explanation of the natural oscillation of prices around the point where the supply and demand curves cross is really worth the cost of the book by itself.
Rothbard was also a frequent attendee at Rand's weekly parties in her apartment in the Empire State Building, according to several sources, including the Branden's. Apparently he ran afoul of Nathaniel, who reportedly mocked him by invariably calling him "Rossbott," a take on Rand's Russian pronunciation of Rothbard's name.
Rothbard and the crew of economics students that usually accompanied him were the primary founders of the anarcho-capitalist school of thought as well, which did not go down well at that point in time, as Rand had just had her encounter with Galambos, which I described elsewhere in detail (based on Galambos' testimony to me personally) leading to her writing of the "Competing Governments" article that is reprinted in "The Virtue of Selfishness."
The best introduction, BTW, to that school of thought is probably Morris and Linda Tannehill's "The Market for Liberty."
I would also mention that one of the major fallacies in economics as a predictive or prescriptive discipline is the idea of man as a perfect economic animal. In fact, as the history of the computer market illustrates again and again, trying to fit the data to some kind of perfect competition model is an exercise in futility. Marginal returns matter, but are rarely the immediate source of decisions.
In fact, most successful companies operate a LONG ways from marginal returns. We human beings are almost unbelievably productive, even under the worst of conditions, and we typically have enormous surpluses of wealth as a consequence, which we usually spend on proving that we are ahead of the Jones. Style and fashion are bigger drivers of economies than pure utility.
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