Crash Course (a YouTube series): Money and Debt.
Milton Friedman, all the way.
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom.
Nobel Laurette Robert Solow in The New Republic: [INDENT] …there was a Good Hayek and a Bad Hayek. The Good Hayek was a serious scholar who was particularly interested in the role of knowledge in the economy (and in the rest of society). …
The Bad Hayek emerged when he aimed to convert a wider public. Then, as often happens, he tended to overreach, and to suggest more than he had legitimately argued. The Road to Serfdom was a popular success but was not a good book. Leaving aside the irrelevant extremes, or even including them, it would be perverse to read the history, as of 1944 or as of now, as suggesting that the standard regulatory interventions in the economy have any inherent tendency to snowball into “serfdom.” The correlations often run the other way. Sixty-five years later, Hayek’s implicit prediction is a failure, rather like Marx’s forecast of the coming “immiserization of the working class.”[/INDENT] Solow expresses the situation mildly. The conservative take-away of the Road to Serfdom was that the welfare state inevitably leads to tyranny. That hypothesis has been falsified: indeed the idea’s main effect was to bolster Latin American generals when they toppled 100 year old democracies. So I’d be wary of reading Road to Serfdom as anything other than an historical curiosity.
And again if somebody wants an entry point I’d recommend something written within the past 30 years. Try a textbook that is at least within its 2nd or 3rd edition. Or a popular treatment.