[Book Review: The Central Banks by Marjorie Deane and Robert Pringle • Viking Penguin • 1995 • 369 pages]

Believing that America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, has almighty power over interest rates and, in turn, the well-being of the country’s economy, the financial press constantly focuses its attention on the actions of the Fed. Fed watching has become a thriving industry, with insiders like former Fed Governor Wayne Angell commanding $100 per minute for his take on what the Fed will do with interest rates.

[Book Review: Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life by David Friedman • Harper Business • 340 pages + xi pages • 1996]

Anyone who has met David Friedman knows he is a man looking to pick an argument. Only the naive or foolish will attempt to joust with him. Careful study of Friedman’s new book, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, will make the reader a better thinker and a more skilled debater, whether the topic is economics, politics, crime, or love and happiness.

[Book Review: Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume II by Murray N. Rothbard]

The November 2008 Intellectual Property Colloquium discusses the recent In re Bilski patent decision by the CAFC. In that case, the court abandoned State Street‘s “useful, concrete and tangible result” test for the patentability of methods, and reaffirmed the “machine-or-transformation” test. Under this test, a method or process claim in a patent is patentable subject matter only if (a) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (b) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing.

In response to my recent reply to Henderson and Hummel’s defense of Alan Greenspan’s Fed, I received a number of e-mail messages. They included one asking me for my two-cents concerning a dispute my correspondent was having with a friend of his who insisted that monetarism, and Milton Friedman’s monetarism in particular, had been a complete failure.

If we ever again are going to have a decent money, it will not come from government: it will be issued by private enterprise, because providing the public with good money which it can trust and use can not only be an extremely profitable business; it imposes on the issuer a discipline to which the government has never been and cannot be subject.... The monopoly of government of issuing money has not only deprived us of good money but has also deprived us of the only process by which we can find out what would be good money.

Just about the only good thing to come out of the housing bubble is that many financial analysts see the virtue of the Austrian theory of the business cycle. Greenspan did his best to blame deregulation and foreigners who saved too much, but many people now think that the Maestro’s ultra-low interest rates in the wake of the dot-com crash may very well have sowed the seeds for our current crisis.

The current issue of Cato Unbound features Roderick Long’s critique of “Conflationism,” defined as the “pervasive conflation of corporatist plutocracy with libertarian laissez-faire.” As Roderick rightly points out, in the mixed economy large corporations are among the prime beneficiaries of government largess, such that a wholesale defense of “big business” is silly and counterproductive for libertarians.