This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Dominick Armentano’s The Myths of Antitrust, later revised and published as Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure. This is a classic work published at the outset of the modern revival of Austrian economics.

[From chapter 23 of The Case Against the Fed.]

Having examined the nature of fractional reserve and of central banking, and having seen how the questionable blessings of Central Banking were fastened upon America, it is time to see precisely how the Fed, as presently constituted, carries out its systemic inflation and its control of the American monetary system.

Emory University in Atlanta Georgia has stirred up student and faculty protests with its plan to cut revenue losing academic programs. The plan includes suspending admission to its Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and to graduate programs in Spanish and economics. Mothballing graduate programs is a magnificent development for a number of reasons and we can only hope that it signals the beginning of a trend among cash-strapped universities.

We now have the announcement that Ben Bernanke’s Fed will buy $45 billion a month in treasuries, QE4, until unemployment reaches 6.5% or his version of inflation exceeds 2.5%. What a surprise!

Last September, when Bernanke announced the third phase of the government’s program of borrowing from itself by creating new money and using it to buy government bonds, I wrote:

The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological phenomenon whereby hostages develop irrational sympathy toward their captors even to the point of defending their captors in subsequent investigations and criminal trials. While this applies to individuals or small groups, the Oslo syndrome applies to whole national populations.

In this very thoughtful book, Brian Leiter calls our attention to a paradox. In most liberal democracies, including the United States, religious believers often are exempt from laws that violate the tenets of their religion. By contrast, parallel claims of exemption on non-religious grounds tend to receive less consideration.

Editor’s Note: Business scandals often lead to calls for greater regulation. Yet, as economist Mark Thornton shows, in so many recent scandals, regulators have been among the chief culprits.

“It had come to be accepted that the pigs, who were manifestly cleverer than the other animals, should decide all questions of farm policy, though their decisions had to be ratified by a majority vote.”

Orwell, G. (1989 [1945]), Animal Farm, S. 34.