While the libertarian vision is much more than simply free markets, economic thinking greatly informs the libertarian approach to public policy. When you’re ready to move beyond the brief introduction provided by P. J. O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich, Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics is the ideal place to turn. Sowell presents the fundamentals of economic reasoning in clear, jargon-free prose. He addresses everything from incentives and the role of prices, to international trade, monetary policy, and the banking system. Sowell shows how so many government programs, enacted with the best of intentions, run afoul of simple economic truths and, as a result, often do far more harm than good.