You Can’t Have Free Markets and an Empire

Plenty of people say they like Ron Paul on the economy but part ways with him on war. Connor O’Keeffe argues that’s not a coherent place to stand. The warfare state—roughly $900 billion a year for the Pentagon alone, plus the intelligence agencies and veterans’ programs—is only fundable because of the two things most libertarians most want gone: the income tax and the Federal Reserve. Strip those away and the empire collapses on the spot. And the causation runs the other way too: war is the health of the state, the coercive tools built for use abroad boomerang home, and the whole imperial project is quietly hollowing out the property rights and sound money that made the country wealthy enough to afford it. Pro-market and anti-war, he argues, is the only consistent position.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 25, 2026.

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