by David L. Bahnsen
2021 / 308 pages

This is a wonderful primer on economics from a conservative Christian perspective (and the second There’s No Free Lunch book I’ve read this year).

Bahnsen is the son of famed Reformed presuppositional apologist Greg Bahnsen, and is famed in his own right as a hedge fund manager for a billion-dollar fund. Here he’s collected 250 concise quotes by a host of famed conservative economists, one per page, and then expanded on each point being made. The quotes are grouped under headings like: Crony Capitalism, Minimum Wage, Division of Labor, and Socialism.

To give you a taste, here’s a couple shorter quotes, this one from Milton Friedman:

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

Here’s another, this time from Thomas Sowell:

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity. There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

These are worth chewing on, and both show why No Free Lunch should be read slowly. But as meaty as these thought are, Bahnsen has made them digestible to all by packaging them into one-page, bite-size servings. Well done!