The Teaching Company is out with a third edition of Professor Tim Taylor’s insanely great Economics course, in audio or DVD formats. It consists of thirty-six 30-minute lectures and Course Guidebooks. Indeed, when you buy online (www.Teach12.com/9ws), they e-mail some course starter materials in a matter of minutes – or so they say. They were offering the DVDs for $99.95 and the audio CDs for $69.95 through March 20, but call them and beat up on them after that date, and see if you can’t talk them into giving you the sale price. Even if you can’t, it’s worth it.

I used to get a lot of inquiries about how to value practices for purchase, sale or partnership. I don’t seem to get them anymore, which may mean the body of information available on this subject, and/or the media through which these transactions can be effected, has deepened to the point of maturity. In case it hasn’t done so sufficiently to answer your questions, or you just want to read something authoritative on the subject, I can recommend How to Value, Buy or Sell a Financial-Advisory Practice by Mark Tibergien and Owen Dahl (Bloomberg, 331 pps., $95). It is an exhaustive (and, unless you’re keenly interested in the subject, at times exhausting) and thoughtful encyclopedia of hard and soft, people and profits issues. And it might just keep you from making a big mistake.

My thanks to the many readers who pointed out that the website for ordering the delightful and enlightening DVD The Power of Choice: The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman is www.ideachannel.com. The phone number, should you need it, is 814.833.7415. In addition to this DVD, the whole original 1980 series Free to Choose is also available. Thanks, y’all.

One of my favorite popular historians is H. W. Brands of the University of Texas. He’s written, among many other things, a very good biography of Benjamin Franklin called, perceptively, The First American, and as good a one-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt as I’ve seen, called (also very perceptively) TR: The Last Romantic (if, but only if, you haven’t the time or energy for Edmund Morris’s definitive biography, two of whose three volumes are out so far). But my personal favorite of his – because, until it, I never completely understood the movement for the independence of Texas from Mexico – is Lone Star Nation.

Brands has written a nice little book for the Atlas Books-W. W. Norton Enterprise series (books by significant writers on economic history, innovation, business and wealth creation) called The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years’ War Over the American Dollar (Atlas/Norton, 239 pps., $23.95). He says, quite correctly, that a "single question vexed American politics and the American economy more persistently than any other" from the American Revolution to the eve of World War I – "the money question. In its simplest form it asked: What constitutes money in the United States? Gold? Silver? Paper currency? Bank notes? Checks? …How much money shall there be? Who ought to control it? To what ends?"

He tells this story through the persons of the great actors in each of the five generations in this time period: Alexander Hamilton and the fight for a national bank and the federal assumption of states’ debts; Nicholas Biddle vs. Andrew Jackson and the battle to kill the national bank; Jay Cooke and the retail public bond financing of the Civil War; Jay Gould and the attempt to corner the gold market in Grant’s administration; Pierpont Morgan and his de facto central bank, which saved the United States from bankruptcy not once but twice.

Brands’s is the perfect introduction to this pageant, these events and these actors. I think even Brands would acknowledge that it’s only an introduction: I’ve recommended any number of books over the years in this newsletter which deal far more intensively with each and all of these episodes. But this is the most accessible, well-written, short introduction you’ll find. And if you’ve held off reading some of the other works I’ve talked about because of time pressures or whatever, this would be a great way to get started reading the utterly fascinating financial history of our country, and of the heroes and the rogues who made that history.

The Davis Funds are doing a quite wonderful PowerPoint presentation called "Healthy Investor Behavior: Avoiding the 3 Most Common Mistakes Investors Make When Building Long-Term Wealth." One may or may not agree that these are indeed the most common three mistakes, but the presentation has a number of very useful and interesting slides/statistics in it; the points it makes are neither obvious nor trivial. I think you’d find it helpful in some of your discussions with clients. I’m guessing, but I assume it’s readily available from your Davis Funds wholesaler.