Thomas Walsh. And Eric Page returned to do a copy edit on the book text and ruin his Memorial Day weekend with a case of Dictionary Eyes because the author didn’t get the manuscript to him until the last possible minute. The cover photo was taken by the brilliant David Burnett, who always makes me look more or less human. (His secret is that he uses someone else for the model.) Tommy Jacomo, magnificent manager of the Palm in Washington, D.C., threw all the semi-inebriated Capital big suits out of his establishment so that David could take the picture. The Washington Palm is the best restaurant in the world and the only place where you can see James Carville eat something other than Ken Starr’s lunch. The little rich guy running away from me was drawn with skill and flair by Daniel Adel. And the whole cover composition was pulled together by Grove/Atlantic art director Charles Rue Woods, assisted by Whitney Cookman. They are geniuses. (One of the best things about writing “Acknowledgments” is that it gives a journalist a break from saying bad things about people. Also, sometimes he gets a free lunch.) There are scores of other people about whom I have good things to say. When I started writing this, I was so ignorant of my subject that I thought “economics” were plural. A number of friends in the financial industry helped walk me through the basics, particularly Hugh Eaton, Richard Morris, and John Ricciardi, partners in the Cursitor-Eaton Asset Management Company, which is now a part of Alliance Capital; and Briget Polichene, former general counsel for the House Banking Committee. I was also assisted by the faculty and students of the Owen School of Management at Vanderbilt University. Dewey Daane, the Frank K. Houston Professor of Finance, emeritus, and a former governor of the Federal Reserve Board, explained money to me—very slowly and using words even I could understand. Luke Froeb, associate professor of management, gave me a pep talk and a reading list, but, most importantly, donated an item of his own classroom material titled “A Traditional Economics Class in Only One Lecture.” It was while reading this that economics began to make sense to me, specifically with the first two sentences of Froeb’s text: “The chief virtue of a capitalist mode of production is its ability to create wealth. Wealth is created when assets are moved from lower- to higher-valued uses.” My best and most-extensive source of economic understanding, however, was the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank run by President Ed Crane and Executive Vice President David Boaz where I hold the unpaid (and I earn it) position of Mencken Research Fellow. The Cato Institute loves freedom,
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