I would suggest Ludwig von Mises, F A Hayek, Murray Rothbard, hans-herman hoppe.
I am not a Chicago School fan. They are Keynesian heretics. They want to replace the Fed’s directors with a computer so it’s not held captive by the whims of politicians. That’s a good aim.
However, I have a problem with a system that requires you to actively spend your savings or have it’s value stolen, by design. That’s what inflating the money supply does, whether it’s by human directors or a computer program. That seems to be to be inherently anti-property rights. If due to the aggregate sum of human activity in a free market, the savings turn out to be worth more or less, that just happens but is not by the design of the system. Friedman’s redeeming qualities were his libertarianism, but just could quite jettison the Keynesianism totally.
I am too have degrees in science (BS in Chemistry and Computer Science, MS in management, and MS in Computer Science) and come by economics from reading.
I have read them all!
I prefer Hayek, he is less pedantic in his writing style then the others. I used to be a gold bug or “hard money man”, though I am now less convinced that it would work in a modern economy. That is why I lean toward the Friedman viewpoint. To me everything else ultimately is a form of barter, which because of its impracticality it fails then economic activity goes to ‘letters of credit (and debit)” and back to bank notes. The question is a unified currency issued by a central authority (bank) or a decentralized currency. History seems to show that a unified currency is more efficient economically, that is, is best for passing “value” between buyer & seller. The question is how do we keep the government out of it? Governments have been mucking up the value of money probably since there was money to muck with & governments to do it! Think Diocletian's devaluing of the Roman imperial currency!
If you went to a non-central bank solution what would you do with the current Federal Reserve notes? Zero them out?
I am not sure I want to change the current system until I am convinced this “cure” is not worse then the “sickness”. If one gets anything out of reading history and in particular economic history is healthy respect for the “Law of Unintended Consequences”.