Recent Podcast Episodes

Can fighting a war ever be just? Murray Rothbard dealt with that question and, of course, had some definitive answers.

Federal Reserve policy has been to expand credit out of nothing without regard for the real damage it does to the economy.

The future of Flock cameras: left the house during a pandemic lockdown? Expect a summons in the mail. Exceeding your "carbon footprint" by driving too much? Expect a ticket in the mail.

Public works as a cure for unemployment: proposed, debated, and defended with arguments that would sound familiar a century later.

The familiar story pits western farmer-debtors against eastern merchant-creditors. Rothbard's evidence says the story is wrong.

Mass unemployment gave the protectionists their best argument in a generation, and they nearly won.

Years before the English currency school made it famous, Americans were arguing for one hundred percent reserves, and some wanted banking abolished outright.

Before the Federal Reserve, before the greenback, American writers were already designing a managed national paper currency, and arguing it could be more stable than gold.

Four western states answered the shortage of money by printing their own, and watched it depreciate in their hands.

They borrowed when prices were high and had to repay when prices were low. Should the legislature rescue them, or would rescue only deepen the ruin?

A wartime boom, a flood of bank paper, a speculative rush for western land, and then the reckoning.

America's first great depression arrived without a villain: no embargo, no war, no single blundering minister to blame. It seemed to rise out of the economy itself.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on students protesting against Israel has once again run into the law, this time in the form of a federal court ruling against the government.

The Federal Reserve’s fixation with “stable prices” has led to an unstable economy for the past century. 

The movement toward liberty has roots in two eras, neither of which saw much liberty. One lineage comes from the Enlightenment while the other emanates from ancient philosophers.

Not even your Roomba vacuum cleaner is safe from state control. Time for the state to give up all economic controls across the board.

Mark Thornton explains the Fed’s real problem: the power to paper over debt, deficits, war, and market cracks until the bill hits consumers.

There are two types of nationality. The first, as defined by Ludwig von Mises, involves people united by common languages and customs. The second is defined by the state.

In America, French-style violence was simply unnecessary for the revolutionaries to win, and we will never know if the Americans might have resorted to greater violence in different circumstances. 

Trump has made his family billions by courting foreign and corporate money and accepting extravagant gifts while in office. But he didn’t bring self-enrichment to Washington, he simply made it much harder to ignore.