Some economists are good at political philosophy as well. Mises and Rothbard of course come to mind, but the good philosophers aren’t confined to Austrian school economists. Amartya Sen and Kenneth Arrow know what they are talking about when it comes to philosophy, agree with them or not. But some eminent economists don’t, and, judging by Nicholas Wapshott’s new book, Samuelson Friedman (Norton, 2021), the most famous American economist of the twentieth century, Paul Samuelson, was not a philosophical giant.

It’s a Silicon Valley truism that there’s little point to patenting a good business idea. If it’s truly good, it will be roundly rejected. More specifically, the potential of what’s a great likely won’t be understood. Think about it. If a good idea were already understood, it would no longer be an idea. It would instead be an existing business concept.

When it comes to policy debates, it’s now pretty clear that if you’d like to sound very quaint and old fashioned, be sure to express some concerns over the size of the federal budget and deficit spending.

Such concerns are now taken about as seriously by the average politician in Washington as is the constitutionality of the PATRIOT Act. Virtually no one cares.