Recent Podcast Episodes

Ryan McMaken looks at the latest jobs numbers form the federal government and why so many workers and families appear to think the economy is in trouble.

Ryan McMaken takes a look at Rothbard's seminal 1963 essay "War, Peace, and the State." 

The Shiller CAPE ratio has only been higher once in 150 years. The Buffett indicator is 2.5 standard deviations above trend. 40% of the S&P 500 is in just ten stocks. Wall Street sees nothing wrong.

Murray Rothbard is one of the all-time greats in Austrian economics and libertarianism. When studying his achievements, we immediately see that Rothbard is a giant whose shoulders free-market scholars should aspire to stand on.

While Republicans have promised robust economic growth to accompany their tax cuts, reality has been different. That is because Republicans increased government spending at the same time, dragging down the economy.

With some simple logic and using Hobbes’s own presuppositions and arguments, we can internally critique Hobbes’s argument for the state, namely, that the state solves none of the problems he presents.

Dr. Wanjiru Njoya argues that Rothbard's political philosophy is not a sideshow to his economics but its essential second pillar, and that this integrated system is precisely what is needed to challenge the egalitarian premise at its root.

Bob argues that many Austro-libertarians (himself included) have been too quick to dismiss the Trump administration's foreign and economic policy as mere incompetence or corruption, without grasping the strategic logic behind it.

On this episode of Power & Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho break down a variety of headlines from the week, including bad inflation data, Trump's trip to China, Kevin Warsh's Senate confirmation, and the political theatre of Spencer Pratt and Zohran Mamdani.

In the year since Donald Trump’s “liberation day” in April 2024 fewer Americans are now working, and inflation-adjusted hourly earnings are still below where they were in 2021.

In 1871, the “discovery” of marginal economic analysis soon took a wrong turn, moving towards quantification, data, and mathematics. It is time to “rediscover” the margin, this time the margin as explained by Carl Menger.

As the economy faulters, socialists are getting elected, promising free goods and services and an end to the chaos. Even when they make things worse, however, they will still gain political power.

Governments take valuable things like paper and minerals, stamp something on them, and call them money, in the process rendering these things almost worthless. Something is wrong with this picture.

Both progressives and conservatives show a complete unwillingness or inability to distinguish between those who got rich by genuinely creating value by serving others and those who are getting rich by expropriating wealth through force.

In this article from 1950, Murray Rothbard suggests some of the less bad ways of financing military operations. Hint: monetary inflation and taxing savings and investment are among the worst.

Karl Marx not only misunderstood value and production, but he also was wrong about large-scale and small-scale property owners.

Who would join a radical minority movement, and commit him- or herself for life to social obloquy and a marginal existence, for the sake of 20% more bathtubs, or 15% more candy bars? Who will man the barricades either physically or spiritually, for more peanuts or Pepsi?

The recent death of Paul Ehrlich reminds us that his crackpot overpopulation theories still are with us, even as they are being regularly discredited.

Ryan McMaken argues that the American constitutional structure has become a suicide pact. It's a system that guarantees growing conflict and provides only one approved solution: more centralized power in Washington.

Every nation-state boundary was drawn by force. Should we treat them as sacred the same way we treat a house or factory? Rothbard says no, and proposes something more radical.