 | Bureaucracy (Liberty Fund Library of the Works of Ludwig Von Mises) by Ludwig Von Mises
Buy new: £8.06 / Used from: £5.01 Best place to start for people frustrated by bureaucracy, red tape, and useless government interventions
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 | America's Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard
Buy new: £13.05 / Used from: £12.86 The truth about the causes of the 1929 Crash and Great Depression - the opposite of what you have been told
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 | Eat the Rich by P.J. O'Rourke
Buy used from: £0.17 O'Rourke at his funniest, and an excellent exposition on the merits of alternative economic systems into the bargain
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 | The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life by Paul Seabright
Buy new: £11.63 / Used from: £5.95 A nice overview of why we have markets and why they work better than the alternatives
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 | Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions by RH Frank
Buy new: £11.99 / Used from: £3.08 How psychology underpins good economics and free markets, contrasting with the bogus psychological generalizations of mainstream economics
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 | Big Players and the Economic Theory of Expectations by Roger Koppl
Buy new: £59.35 / Used from: £56.85 Written in 2002, this book deserves greater attention than its price allows, for the accurate and prescient way it explains the behaviour that led up to the Credit Crunch.
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 | Economics in One Lesson by H Hazlitt
Buy used from: £11.01 The best introduction to the type of economics that has some practical use and basis in reality - very clear, enjoyable, and easy to read
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 | Constitution of Liberty (Routledge Classics) by F.A. Hayek
Buy new: £11.69 / Used from: £10.00 Better and more important contribution than Hayek's more famous "Road to Serfdom" - explains why modern liberalism (in the American sense) is the opposite of true liberalism.
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 | AN ESSAY ON THE NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE. by Lionel. Robbins
Buy used from: £10.00 Short but important text - mathematical pseudo-economists ought to go back and read this before spouting any more of the nonsense that has come to pass as economics.
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 | The Wealth of Nations: Books 1-5 by Adam Smith
Buy new: £11.53 / Used from: £15.78 Maybe not as original as people think, and not always right, but still more right, more readable and more wise than most mainstream modern economics
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 | The Limits of State Action by Wilhelm Von Humboldt
Buy new: £8.06 / Used from: £4.46 Another original and great, but more forgotten than Smith, thanks to Germany's disastrous swing to the left after 1848
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 | What Is Free Trade? by Frederic Bastiat
Buy new: £14.44 / Used from: £10.36 And the French were important contributors to the development of real economics too - but again largely forgotten as the French are more susceptible to mad ideas than good ones like this
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| Ethics as Social Science: The Moral Philosophy of Social Cooperation (New Thinking in Political Economy Series) by L.B. Yeager
Buy new: £24.70 / Used from: £15.00 An under-rated and under-stated modern great - we'd have been better off if economists had paid more attention to measured thinkers like Yeager than to his more strident contemporaries
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| Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles (Hardcover) by Jesú³ µerta de Soto
Buy used from: £169.52 It's a bit of a doorstop, but it tells an important story. Updates Mises' "Theory of Money and Credit", which would be a shorter alternative that still stands the test of time
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 | The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Buy new: £5.36 / Used from: £3.76 See also "Fooled by Randomness". Explains why modern mathematical economists are not good at either maths or economics. Gained credibility and profile from correctly warning about the Credit Crunch.
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