[FDR: A New Political Life by David T. Beito, Chicago: Open Universe, 2025, 283 pp.]

The president pushed for policies that would confound trade abroad and create economic havoc on the home front. Surrounding himself with inflationists, protectionists, and economic interventionists, the president forced up the costs of production of nearly everything all the while claiming he was saving the economy.

“I am getting more and more convinced the war-peace question is the key to the whole libertarian business,” Murray Rothbard wrote to his friend Kenneth Templeton in 1959. Rothbard had seen an article recently rejected by National Review in which he proposed a return to a restrained foreign policy and nuclear disarmament by both the USSR and United States. This marked one of the moments that would push Rothbard to abandon the New Right of William F. Buckley Jr.

The battle of ideas is not an intellectual exercise, and the Mises Institute is not in the business of discussing ideas for their own sake. Murray Rothbard understood what is at stake, and he knew that ideas are at the center of winning the real-world fight against our greatest enemy, the state.

“You have turned, Mr. President, the right of every American to have access to decent healthcare into reality for the first time in American history.”

Those are the words then-Vice President Joe Biden said to President Obama in the East Room of the White House on March 23, 2010, as he prepared to sign the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—or Obamacare—into law.

At the US-Saudi Investment Forum on November 19, 2025, entrepreneurial titan Elon Musk shared with his audience his vision of the future shaped by advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Among other things, Musk said: “And my guess is, if you go out long enough—assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely—money will stop being relevant.”