“The right man in the right place at the right time.” That’s a quote from an important article in Newsweek by economist Milton Friedman in which he claimed that the person about to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board would be a good pick. No, Friedman didn’t write that in 2005 about Ben Bernanke. Instead, he wrote it in 1970 about his friend and fellow inflation hawk, Arthur Burns, who, shortly after becoming Fed chairman, stoked the fires of inflation and turned out to be one of the worst Fed chairmen of the post-World War II years. Moreover, Burns,...