Recent Podcast Episodes

Mark Thornton warns that war propaganda turns citizens into dupes. Ludwig von Mises’s critique of statism explains why foreign conflicts keep returning.

Austrian economics does not share the same methodology as we see in the economics mainstream. The Austrian emphasis on praxeology provides a better explanation of economic events than does the mathematically-bound mainstream.

Ryan McMaken dismantles three persistent myths of American healthcare before tracing the origins of social insurance to Bismarck's deliberate scheme to bind citizens to the state "by the chains of gratitude" and closing with Mises' 1944 prediction that a population half-dependent on government healthcare would never vote to dismantle it.

Intervention begets intervention. This was the case following the American Revolution, as the consequences of inflation, credit expansion, and wartime disruptions set up for the depression of 1784 in peacetime.

While Adam Smith is celebrated in some circles as the “Father of Free-Market Economics” (Austrians would disagree), his writings on the “disadvantages” of the worker are misleading.

As AI becomes a more important and visible part of our lives, the movement to regulate it also grows. The standard regulation narratives—that government regulates things in the name of the public interest—clearly do not fit the facts.

On this episode of Power and Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho discuss the recent SCOTUS decisions as well as JD Vance's recent praise for the economic views of Alexander Hamilton.

Every July 4th, politicians climb podiums, flags wave, a hundred million dollars’ worth of fireworks scatter across the sky, and somewhere between the hot dogs and the stadium-rock anthems, it becomes easy to confuse the theater of freedom with the substance of it.

Democratic socialist candidates are becoming a serious political challenge in Democratic Party primaries. Have Americans suddenly become convinced by the arguments in favor of command economies, or is there something deeper going on?

The media tells us that the rape allegations that brought down Graham Platner’s Senate campaign just came to light. Actually, the media had those allegations for months, but sat on them to protect Platner’s campaign.

"The main aim of American foreign policy is to impose the will of our ruling elite on the rest of the world." 

How the Industrial Revolution and foreign investment made some nations rich while others stayed poor, closing with Mises’s defense of capitalism.

The crucial difference between physical “capital goods” and “capital” as an accounting concept, and how profit and loss, private property, and economic calculation steer production toward what consumers actually want.

The two great confusions about money and interest, from Aristotle’s “money cannot beget money” to modern credit expansion, and how monetary manipulation by banks and governments produces inflation and the business cycle.

The first economics lecture: how saving, capital goods, and investment build modern prosperity—illustrated by the fisherman who forgoes today’s catch to make nets—and why capital must be guided by economic calculation.

Why Marxism spread so widely while going long unchallenged, how its slogans slipped into everyday speech, and the Marxian urge to “organize” society by treating individuals as raw material to be arranged.

How Marxism claims that truth itself is attainable only in a classless society, and how the cult of “action” and violence—by way of Georges Sorel and French syndicalism—fed into Leninism, fascism, and Nazi racial doctrine.

The liberal ideal of the individual and rational, welfare-serving law, and a defense of the Industrial Revolution against the myth that early capitalism degraded the common man.

Marx’s doctrine of class and class conflict: the claim that class interests determine how people think and set the classes in irreconcilable conflict—with Mises noting that Marx never actually defined what a class is.

Mises opens the philosophical half of the course by arguing that Marx’s materialism—the claim that a person’s economic class shapes his very ideas and logic—dominates modern thought, and he begins to dismantle it.