Recent Podcast Episodes

Ryan McMaken, Timothy Terrell, Charles Sauer, and Robert Murphy take questions from the audience on healthcare economics, free market alternatives, and the prospects for reform.

America’s elderly political class is only the most visible symptom. The deeper problem is a government built to transfer wealth from younger Americans to a caste of older, wealthier generations.

If avoiding a repeat of the excesses of the French revolution is an important goal, we need a thorough understanding of its causes. Edmund Burke and his conservative followers don't offer this. 

Bob Murphy makes the case that American healthcare's dysfunction is not a market failure but a pricing failure manufactured by government. He closes with practical reform proposals designed to restore market signals without waiting for Washington.

It's not the starving artist who resents capitalism—it's the millionaire columnist.

Great Britain’s “Equality Act” is not simply a civil rights bill gone too far. It is, as Murray Rothbard would have put it, a “monstrous” piece of legislation that looks to create a social and economic equality that could never exist.

Charles Sauer profiles four healthcare entrepreneurs who built functioning free-market alternatives to the broken hospital system before turning to Washington to explain why Capitol Hill is not the solution, walking through the government-created distortions that sustain the status quo.

Since abandoning socialism 30 years ago, Poland’s economy has grown, as one would expect with a market economy. However, there could be more economic freedom there that easily would translate into a booming economy.

Lolcows, part of the world of internet personalities, would seem well beyond the world of economic analysis. Yet, much of what happens can be explained by the paradigm of Austrian economics.

Timothy Terrell traces the historical origins of the American healthcare cartel, beginning with Ronald Hamowy's 1979 article documenting how the AMA used state licensing laws not to protect patients but to restrict physician supply and raise incomes.

Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty. No matter whether it is their intention or not, almost anything that the rich can legally do tends to help the poor.

Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of economics, served as the tutor for Austrian-Hungary’s Crown Prince Rudolf, the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph. But Rudolph’s untimely death in 1889 would end up changing the ruling dynamics of pre-World War I Central Europe.

The essay added later to the collection: a critique of proposals to nationalize banking and credit, weighing bureaucratic against profit management and warning of credit overexpansion and immobilization.

Mises’s focused analysis of price controls: why fixing prices produces shortages and demands for still more controls, and what that reveals for the theory of social organization as a whole.

How German “anti-Marxism,” including national (anti-Marxian) socialism, absorbed the very Marxian ideas it claimed to oppose, with Werner Sombart as the case study of a thinker Marxist and anti-Marxist by turns.

A critique of the German “Socialists of the Chair” and their social policy—by way of the Methodenstreit, the clash of control versus economic law, and Max Weber—showing how “social liberalism” abandons liberalism itself.

Bob uses U.S. economic history, centering on the greenback era, to work through some subtle but important distinctions in Austrian monetary theory.

Mises examines the doctrine of a “hampered” or regulated market as a distinct third system and answers Schmalenbach’s thesis that free enterprise was giving way to a bound economy.

The central essay: interventionism as a supposed economic system, the real nature of intervention, and how price ceilings, minimum wages, and similar measures defeat their own aims—leaving only a choice between the free market and socialism.

Mises’s 1929 preface, written in Vienna for the original German edition, presenting the essays as a sustained critique of interventionism, then the reigning economic policy across Europe and America.