Recent Podcast Episodes

Economics’ greatest unsolved mystery, finally explained.

Mainstream economists claim that understanding and observing reality is not really “doing economics.” Instead, they believe that all we need are abstract theories that predict events well. But over time, financial markets must bend to the real world.

On this July 4, Americans will celebrate 250 years of independence. However, what are people really celebrating, freedom or a militaristic regime?

Mark Thornton argues modern politics is a power struggle run by elites—and that Austrian economics explains both the rigged system and the way out.

Pandemics offer an alleged challenge to libertarians, as some argue that governments should have the power to order quarantines and impose vaccine requirements. It turns out that statism makes things worse—and that free markets offer the best solutions.

The Fed was a government-sanctioned cartel engineered by the Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb interests to enable coordinated inflation.

With the Democrats ascendant under Wilson, the reformers repackage the Aldrich Plan as the ostensibly decentralized, government-supervised Federal Reserve—with Morgan-allied interests securing control.

The Panic of 1907 becomes the catalyst. Rothbard traces the response.

Around 1906, Jacob Schiff and his relative Paul Warburg rally the American Bankers Association and its leading commercial bankers behind banking reform.

The theory put into practice: imposing the gold-exchange standard on U.S. dependencies and client states administered by a cadre of economists and academics and tying client currencies to the dollar.

Rothbard shows how Conant’s claim that mature economies must export capital abroad linked banking reform to economic imperialism.

Treasury secretaries Lyman Gage and Leslie Shaw used government deposits to aid the banks and inch the country toward central banking.

The first organized big-business push for banking reform.

Why the nation’s big banks grew dissatisfied with the post–Civil War National Banking System.

Rothbard frames the 1913 Federal Reserve Act as part of the Progressive drive from laissez-faire toward centralized statism.

While the pundits are insisting that the late Alan Greenspan was a committed free market adherent, his actions throughout his career spoke differently. In today’s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon exposes Greenspan for what he was: an opportunist.

Were stronger central government under the Articles of Confederation and a central bank really necessary to win the American Revolution, as conservative nationalists of the era claimed?

The Fed's real mandate is financing government debt and protecting banks. Everything else is propaganda.

Ryan McMaken looks at the little known (in America) secessionist war for self-determination fought by French counterrevolutionaries against the French Jacobins and radicals. The Marxist narrative about this conflict endures, but the separatists were right.

The famed "Custer's Last Stand" at the hands of Native Americans defending their villages is a reminder of the brutality of the US war against the Plains Indians. History tells us that the "heroic" George Armstrong Custer was really the "reckless" Custer who died underestimating his foe.