Recent Podcast Episodes

“The Civil War was really the watershed,” he wrote Meyer. “Lincoln was America’s first dictator, and almost all the Republican Acts were monstrous.”

The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk has focused attention on political violence. Ludwig von Mises, not surprisingly, understood that tying morality to politicized state helps create the climate where political violence is prevalent.

During the Middle Ages, taxation was considered to be appropriate only as an extreme measure in times of emergency, and as a last resort. Kings were expected to subsist on revenues from their own private property.

Jonathan Newman joins Bob to unpack Eliezer Yudkowsky’s viral bubble theory and contrasts it with the Austrian view of boom-bust cycles.

Leftists seek to create a new society that supposedly is peaceable. However, they also celebrate violence done against political opponents, something that Murray Rothbard understood as undermining every supposed peaceful goal they claim to be pursuing.

The compliance-driven health regime sidelines decentralized knowledge and choice.

A long-enduring myth about money is that we need a flexible or "elastic" currency for the economy to grow. Economist Jonathan Newman joins us to talk about why this has never been true. 

According to mainstream economists, inflation aids economic growth while deflation impairs growth. Austrian economists, however, point out that in much of US history, economic growth was accompanied by deflation.

Advocates for US military intervention have invoked the war against the Barbary pirates as justification. Yet, an examination of that conflict shows that President Jefferson’s actions were limited and followed the direction of Congress.

Troops in blue cities, Comey’s indictment, and shutdown theater.

Was Jackson’s victory over the Second Bank of the United States a triumph for liberty, or did it merely expand federal authority under the guise of constraining it? His legacy is complicated, but there is much we can learn from it.

The Renaissance period is seen as mostly positive by historians, but the sinister development of absolutism and the imperial state complicates the legacy of that time.

Although the political establishment claims the Comey indictment represents an unprecedented moment in our history, the truth is much different. Federal prosecutors have a long history of bringing unjustified, politically-motivated prosecutions.

The media is trying to frame last week’s indictment of James Comey as a “norm-shattering” use of executive power for personal gain. In truth, it's just the latest chapter in a much older story: the struggle between elected and unelected officials.

By trying to protect dairy farmers and raise their incomes, the government created a massive cheese surplus, then gave it away, thus harming the farmers they were trying to support.

Professor Georgy Ganev joins Bob to explain that, contrary to the claims of David Graeber and the MMTers, the barter origin of money has not been refuted.

Created to assure that newly-freed slaves would receive equal legal protection, the Fourteenth Amendment has come to dominate federal jurisprudence. This is not a good thing.

Individual voters have little reason to become informed. Politicians have strong incentives to pander rather than persuade. Partisans are rewarded for tribal loyalty rather than epistemic integrity.

Mark Thornton shows why real conservation comes from property rights and prices, not bureaucratic targets.

New letters, from Murray Rothbard to Frank Meyer, have been discovered by researcher Daniel Flynn detailing some of Rothbard's earliest views on Ayn Rand, and what later went wrong.