Say what you like about the free-marketeers, they certainly know how to ignore market forces, eschew profit and embrace subsidization when it suits them. I just got the 2006 Liberty Fund catalog in the post, and as usual I am having a hard time not buying a lot of their absurdly under-priced offerings. You can get the complete Sraffa/Dobb edition of Ricardo (eleven volumes!) for about a hundred bucks, or $12 for individual volumes. (The true measure of value is in there somewhere.) For similar prices, there’s more Gordon Tullock or James Buchanan than any sane person would ever want to read. You can also get the whole Glasgow Edition of Smith for seventy five dollars. Or sixteen hundred pages of Armen Alchian for fifteen dollars. They’re also strong on Enlightenment types, with Hume’s History of England on the cheap, and you can find any amount of reactionary commentary on the French Revolution, too.

On the other hand, you can get a lot of this stuff (the Ricardo, for instance) for free and in PDF format at their Online Library of Liberty.