Liam McCollum interviews Mises Institute Fellow Jeffery Degner about his new book, Inflation and the Family. Liam and Dr. Degner talk about the Federal Reserve’s destructive policies, explain Cantillon Effects and how the government creates wealth inequality with inflation, and react to Dean Withers on inflation and Tucker Carlson’s populist economics. 

Independence Day in America is often remembered with a simplified narrative: British tyranny provoked a revolt in the colonies, culminating in American independence. This account emphasizes the Revolution itself, buttressed by many hagiographies (and many revisionist hamartographies).

Profit Without Apology: The Need to Stand Up For Business by Onkar Ghate and Dan Watkins. (ARU Press, 2025)

In most of the world, inflation is no longer an exception, it is the rule. Official inflation targets of 4 percent, 5 percent, or even 6 percent per year have become normalized, sold as signs of macroeconomic health. Yet these same rates quietly destroy savings, erode wages, and discourage long-term planning—especially for the poor. At just 6 percent annual inflation, the purchasing power of $100 drops to under $55 in ten years.

Mises solved the circularity problem of money’s value by arguing, following Menger’s work, the original price of a money was established by its previous exchange ratios to other commodity goods in a barter economy which gave it purchasing power as a medium of exchange.