Hopefully they won’t run into the same problems that Glenn Fleischmann did, but Capitalism.Net has posted a 30 megabyte PDF of Ludwig Von Mises’ book, Socialism. Published in 1922, Socialism outlined what would turn out to be the fundamental problem faced by non-market economies — namely their inability to make rational economic decisions due to the lack of a functioning pricing system.
Mises’ conclusions about socialism are uncontroversial today, given that the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba and other socialist economies have experienced exactly the sort of thing that Mises predicted would happen in the absence of a system of free market pricing. But in the 1920s, this was far from obvious and Mises never really received the recognition he deserved during his life time.