Another good, "popular" Austrian-school book is What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray Rothbard. The Theory of Money and Credit by Mises is on same subject but it's more comprehensive, the tone is more academic and is considerably harder. Both are available online.
http://mises.org/money.asp http://mises.org/books/Theory_Money_Credit/Contents.aspx
(Ignoring the solid principle that accelerating future economic activity fails when the future inevitably arrives, something we're seeing right now in US residential real estate.)
What is the argument for why the CfC program was bad or ineffective?
Which it took from future sales.
Whether it's better or worse than financial institution measures has nothing to do with whether it was good or bad. If they were both bad and it was less bad, it's still bad.
The argument that it was bad is ... the broken window fallacy. Perfectly fine working cars that could have been sold to people who can't afford new ones were destroyed (the engine oil replaced with a chemical solution that destroyed it after running for a short period of time).
To get a good balance, I'd say to read something from Paul Krugman, Rob Reich, Greg Mankiw to understand left, center and rightist views on neo-Keynesian thought. For "Chicago School" / monetarist thought, Milton Friedman's "Capitalism & Freedom" is a good primer.
For a more scholarly view, "Money, Markets, and Sovereignty" is a great one for global-economic thought at the most macro level, and "Financial Innovation" (Molyneux) is awesome for showing where all of this came from - though only the first three chapters are accessible for someone who isn't comfortable with math.
(ADDED: OK, they're relevant today because they provide a convenient excuse for politicians to do something the latter love, to spend lots of money to get re-elected (see second paragraph of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1465384 or any of the Great Depression histories that break out where the New Deal money was actually spent (three guesses)) ... but then again, does a beginner need to know anything more than that they offer an excuse for borrowing lots of money to then spend?
OK, yes, there's a bit more: the US Stimulus bill isn't even proper neo-Keynesian economics because of how slowly it's being spent and where much of the money is going; the multiplier is almost certainly negative. That does help in understanding how we got to today's situation. But I'm pretty sure if you read very much Austrian economics this will be covered.)
The Austrians are still making sense in our "modern" situation (is it really very much more modern than when they developed it in the last century???) and are still worth reading and even potentially adopting as the school you'll follow.
Studying the Chicago/monetarist school is important, although I would put them second after the Austrians.