What are the best books on economics by free-market economics opponents?

Excuse me, hello everyone one, is this even a question. There is this guy, maybe you all have heard of him called Marx?  I mean he lived a long time ago and he wrote much of his stuff in German so maybe people have not heard of him. Well I have learned lately that this author wrote an amazing book call 'Capital'.  You should be able to get a version at most good book stores.  Just go to the clerk and say you want this book called Capital by the author called Marx, not one of the Marx brothers. Now what is amazing about this book, this book Capital, is not only does it turn out it has been read by hundreds of millions of people since it was first published, but that almost everyone alive who critics Capitalist Free Market systems has not only read it but also references it. There even have a community of other writers who have followed along on the publication of Capital expanding the ideas and evolving them.  They are called something like Marxites or Marxists or something like that.  It turns out there are millions of them. And not only have they written books, but people who followed this even ran whole COUNTRIES.  I know its amazing, how could this have not gotten on Fox News right?  But it seems to be true.  And not even small countries but really big ones like Russia, China, a large part of Germany and half of Korea. Now I know this may not be as famous as 'Economics in One Lesson'  or 'Globalization and its Discontents', but it turns out not only does just about every University in the world still have these Marxists scholars on staff, but they also still have Political parties all over the world.  In fact it just came to may attention that a Marxist party still runs China, that a Marxist party runs a huge part of India and that the President of Brazil is a Marxist.  In fact in the emerging economies we love to call the BRICs Marx is probably the most read economist of them all. And what amazing is that there is a flood of other economists, sociologists, and political thinkers who you really can't understand before you read Marx.  No body really major, but a few names include: Theodor W. Adorno Louis Althusser Antonio Labriola Walter Benjamin Eduard Bernstein Ernst Bloch Amadeo Bordiga Bertolt Brecht Cornelius Castoriadis Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya James Connolly Guy Debord Daniel De Leon Joseph Dietzgen Raya Dunayevskaya Terry Eagleton Friedrich Engels Ernesto "Che" Guevara Antonio Gramsci Harry Haywood Max Horkheimer Enver Hoxha C.L.R. James Fredric Jameson Edvard Kardelj Karl Kautsky Alexandra Kollontai Karl Korsch D. D. Kosambi Paul Lafargue Henri Lefebvre Vladimir Lenin Georg Lukács Rosa Luxemburg Jan WacÅ‚aw Machajski Herbert Marcuse Sam Marcy José Carlos Mariátegu Paul Mattick Andy Merrifield Antonio Negri Sylvia Pankhurst Anton Pannekoek Georgi Plekhanov Nicos Poulantzas Maximilien Rubel Otto Rühle Alfred Sohn-Rethel Joseph Stalin[16][17] Kim Il-sung George Derwent Thomson Leon Trotsky Raymond Williams Karl August Wittfogel Mao Zedong Slavoj Žižek Josip Broz Tito All kidding aside I am sorry but this may be the dumbest question ever asked on Quora.

There are two books, written at around the same time, that defined and advanced the current discourse regarding free markets versus collective action approaches to organizing human economic activity. Reading both is generally a requisite part of graduate programs in political economy because virtually all analysis and debate in academia and public policy spheres today revolve around the questions and ideas in these two books.  On the free market side is the well known work by Fredrich Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom." On the opposition to free markets side is the presently less well known, but equally important work by economic historian Karl Polanyi, "The Great Transformation." People should consider themselves illiterate in the fundamental arguments regarding the role of markets in the modern state until both books have been read, particularly Polanyi's work because it is less well represented in current, mainstream discourse.

I followed the overlapping Peak Oil and Global Warming crowds to critiques of the academic discipline for failing to base itself on physics (see e.g. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8476 and http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ ) and "ecological economics" (no link, but see here http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html for a sober/terrifying look at the underlying reality). You might also enjoy the Krugman/Stiglitz/etc. critique of "freshwater" economics. See http://physicsoffinance.blogspot.com/2011/09/milton-friedmans-grand-illusion.html , http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=finance-why-economic-models-are-always-wrong , http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/calibration-and-all-that-wonkish/ .

The Screwing of the Average Man by David Hapgood http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/rape10.shtml This book is not about economic philosophy.  It is about what goes on where the rubber meets the road.  The Age of Uncertainty by John Kenneth Galbraith  book and video Consider a simple idea.  45 years after the Moon landing shouldn't engineers pretty much know all about the mechanics of automobiles?  So why keep redesigning them?  But when do you ever hear economists discuss planned obsolescence?  Do we need to redesign vacuum cleaners?  LOL Is consumerism really just a distortion of the free market based on consumers being dumb?