So, as the headline has it, begins the subtitle of John Tamny’s latest book, Who Needs the Fed? It might have been even more aptly titled The Emperor Has No Clothes. It explodes the myth that government agencies, especially the Federal Reserve System, can be a force for prosperity and with justice for all.

John Tamny herein provides the recipe for an American Economic Miracle. Those who find the Fed a soporific subject need not recoil. This book (full disclosure, in which I generously am noted in the acknowledgements) is about people.

It is all about how innovation of, by, and for the people, not the government, is the true engine of equitable prosperity.

Tamny has been handsomely praised by George Will as “a one-man antidote to economic obfuscation and mystification.” Steve Forbes writes of his new book, “Like a blazing sun melting away a dangerously thick fog, this delightfully written, well-argued and insightful book.… It will become one of the most enormously — and positively — influential treatises of our time.”

Two score and seven years ago our forefathers — Jack Kemp, Robert Mundell, Arthur Laffer, Jude Wanniski, Lewis E. Lehrman, and Steve Forbes, among others — brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Supply-side economics proved a powerful remedy for stagflation and for the creation of an era of historically unprecedented equitable prosperity.

Now a new generation arises to advance the revolutionary thinking of us Old Guard supply-siders. Tamny revises and extends the guiding principles of supply-side economics to tackle a new set of challenges. In so doing he joins the ranks of our most important rising thought leaders.

[…]

Tamny is hardly didactic. He makes his points with abundant anecdotes from, and references to, contemporary pop culture.

He commences with a story about Uber rescuing his wife from having to wait hours for a Metro train after a Taylor Swift concert. He reflects on the implications of Uber and continues, later, with reflections on Taylor Swift’s wealth and creditworthiness.

Tamny devotes a full chapter to what professional sports teaches us about credit.

Then he takes us through an amazing story of how hard it is, even for wildly successful producers, to get a Hollywood movie financed. He then shows how venture capitalism works in Silicon Valley and why failure there is considered a badge of honor.

He offers an instructive little-known story of Donald Trump’s application to Security Pacific Bank for a loan to revitalize the Ambassador Hotel. The bank had been burned previously by loaning more money than was prudent to the charismatic Peter Ueberroth. Having only partially internalized the lesson it then lost a shirt to Trump.

[…]

Read the full article at The American Spectator.

Ralph Benko, internationally published weekly columnist, co-author of The 21st Century Gold Standard, lead co-editor of the Gerald Malsbary translation from Latin to English of Copernicus’s Essay on Money, is American Principles Project’s Senior Advisor, Economics.