This article is a transcript of Ryan McMaken’s lecture at the 2025 Mises University at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

In 2004, the late historian Ralph Raico, a longtime senior fellow at the Mises Institute, presented a ten-hour lecture series here at the Institute on the history of political thought. He called it “History: The Struggle for Liberty” and attempted to present his students with a concise summary of the more than 400 years of political thought that underlies the political ideology of laissez-faire.

Summertime at the Mises Institute is a big deal. Every year from May to August, our top faculty convenes to lead our research fellowship programs and student seminars. The summer ends with our biggest event, Mises University, in which we host more than a hundred college students here at the Mises Institute campus. These young students have the opportunity to spend a full week learning all the basics of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace directly from our senior fellows and other scholars, many of whom are Mises University alumni themselves.

A recent survey has caused quite a stir in France, highlighting a new reality facing a changing Europe: the brain drain and expatriation of its most productive individuals. “Brain drain is a phenomenon that Europe generally attributes to the African continent. Now, France is fully affected.”

Murray Rothbard’s view of the origins of World War II has an important lesson for us today. Many people today think that a non-interventionist foreign policy is unrealistic.  Neocons always cry out “Hitler!” if you resist their demands for all-out war. “Hitler openly avowed his plan to conquer the world in Mein Kampf! How can you ‘isolationists’ ignore that!” Rothbard had a simple answer to this.

Next week, New York City voters almost surely will send self-proclaimed socialist Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion, and he promises to impose several policies aimed at allegedly lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers. Like his progressive and socialist predecessors, Mamdani’s policies will fail spectacularly, but not before doing enormous damage to the city—something that neither he nor his supporters will acknowledge.

The Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee has cut the target interest rate five times since September of 2024, and, not surprisingly, CPI inflation has increased every month for the past six months.

According to the September consumer price index report, released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, price inflation rose 0.3 percent in September, month over month.