The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier and More Prosperous America by Arthur Brooks. Conservatives are seen (far too often by themselves) as advocating for such values as fiscal discipline and curbing the debt as ends in themselves—as austerity for its own sake, or to protect and advance the interests of the “rich.” Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, would have us realize, and testify to the fact, that fiscal soundness is the only way to sustain the social safety net in the long run—otherwise we become Greece, or Detroit. Likewise we do not seek to curb soaring dependency on the state out of some animus against the poor. On the contrary, we seek to endow them with the dignity of productive work and self-sufficiency. Going into an election cycle in which the extreme left is already demonizing conservatives as insatiably greedy, hard-hearted and even racist, the thoughtful advisor will welcome this genuinely beautiful book.
America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve by Roger Lowenstein. The idea of a central bank has always been anathema to a wide swath of Americans—and, albeit for different reasons than those espoused by Jefferson and especially Jackson, remains so today. Indeed, only the IRS is hated more than the Fed in public survey after survey. This helps explain why—operating without a central bank from the time Jackson killed it in 1837 until the coming of the Fed in 1913—the U.S. financial system was the worst species of emerging market chaos, long after we became the world’s largest economy. Roger Lowenstein—the early and most perceptive biographer of Buffett, and the chronicler of Long-Term Capital Management—brings to life in this new book the tortuous political and legislative path which culminated finally in endowing the United States with a lender of last resort. One wonders if the legislation which created an independent Federal Reserve could pass today—and doubts it. America’s Bank is a splendid book of economic history by a first-rate writer, with resonances in this morning’s headlines.
Honorable Mentions: Bethany McLean’s Shaky Ground, a startling report on the perilously undead Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; David McCullough’s evocative and charming life of the Wright Brothers; John Tamny’s delightful Popular Economics: What the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey and LeBron James Can Teach You About Economics; Greg Steinmetz’s fascinating and fast-moving The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger; Morton Kondracke’s and Fred Barnes’s Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America.
© 2015 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings in the “Resources” feature of his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. To download the current sample issue, visit www.nickmurray.com and click on “Newsletter.”