Fascism: The Career of a Concept. By Paul E. Gottfried.  Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. Vii + 226 pages.

A hundred years ago, British units (alongside a smaller French force) attacked the Germans on an eleven-mile wide front in Picardy, straddling the Somme River. The attack was the attempt to break through on the Western Front, and in accordance with emerging artillery doctrine and practice, the German lines were saturated with shells for a week in advance. But when the artillery stopped to allow the British to attack, the Germans raced out of their deep dugouts, manned their machine guns, and mowed down the British attackers.

Ludwig von Mises is not an easy figure to get your arms around. His writings total tens of thousands of pages. A newcomer to Mises could be lost in this vast body of work. That’s why the Institute is publishing The Mises Reader.

Mises put the ideals of liberty, property, and peace before his professional prestige, his career, his income, even his personal safety. He suffered for this, but not even Hitler could silence him. It is a proud record that shines through the darkness of the 20th century like a beacon.

Today the Wall Street Journal published a letter to the editor written by Mark Thornton on the Fed’s basic misunderstanding of “natural” interest rates. 

Dr. Thornton writes:

Economics, as we have now seen again and again, is a science of recognizing secondary consequences. It is also a science of seeing general consequences. It is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some special interest in the short run, but on the general interest in the long run.

This is the lesson that has been the special concern of this book. We stated it first in skeleton form, and then put flesh and skin on it through more than a score of practical applications.

In his new book Who Needs the Fed?, John Tamny makes a convincing case that the Federal Reserve is wholly unnecessary. Chapter after chapter, he offers examples of individuals engaging in credit transactions and explains how any government manipulation of these transactions is counterproductive or, at best, unnecessary.

During Friday’s bloodbath I heard a CNBC anchor lady assuring her (scant) remaining audience that Brexit wasn’t a big sweat. That’s because it is purportedly a political crisis, not a financial one.

Presumably in the rarified canyons of Wall Street, politics doesn’t matter much. After all, when things get desperate enough, Washington caves and does “whatever it takes” to get the stock averages moving upward again.

Here’s a news flash. That’s all about to change.