The Menace of Inflation: A Symposium, edited by G. Carl Wiegand (Devin-Adair, 229 pp., $8.95). Arthur Burns has said that inflation is our “Number One problem in the long run,” and multitudes of financially harried Americans (including, one suspects, many who were once bemused by the notion that a little bit of inflation was good for the country) might agree with him. The 16 authors of The Menace of Inflation give point and cogency to Burns’s caveat. Moreover, if they sometimes differ, even on important matters, they nevertheless agree in repudiating the fashionable wisdom that government can contain inflation and remedy all the ills associated therewith. Rather, they persuasively argue, government itself is the problem. These essays—by such knowledgeable and well-known writers as John Chamberlain, Lawrence Fertig, Patrick Boarman, Arthur Kemp, and Yale Brozen, among others—were first delivered at a conference of the Committee for Monetary Research and Education held at Georgetown University in 1974. Relatively easy to read for the most part, even the more difficult among them amply repay careful attention. This is a hard-hitting book, and it also contains more distilled wisdom on the troublesome subject of inflation than one will encounter in any comparable volume known to this reviewer.
MICHAEL F. CONNORS
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