Recent Podcast Episodes

A game show finalist looked at a rigged final round and told his opponent, "I'm going to steal—and then split it with you." He didn't play the game. He changed it. Lucas Engelhardt on entrepreneurs and game theory.

Two of the best American Austrians feuded over a book review, trained no successors, and their school quietly died out. Paul Cwik and Shawn Ritenour on the Austrians you may not know, and the ones we almost lost.

While the democratic socialists are claiming to just want a society like they have in Denmark, their real aims are the seizure of all or most private property and especially private capital.

The Fed was sold as a check on Wall Street's power. Wall Street's share of the nation's bank reserves went up after it passed, not down. Patrick Newman on the Federal Reserve as cronyism.

Sociologists blame job instability. Legal scholars blame deregulation. Jeffrey Degner noticed all the clues point back to the same address: the Federal Reserve.

We assume people are self-interested in the market and selfless in government. Tate Fegley on why dropping that double standard explains almost everything about how the state actually behaves.

Washington locked up timberland to stop deforestation, while taxing Canadian lumber, which meant felling more American trees. Timothy Terrell on conservation policy, and following the money.

Everyone wants the one key to economic growth—capital, or technology, or trade. Shawn Ritenour argues there is no single key, and that's exactly what the models keep missing.

Marx said your logic depends on your class. The Nazis said it depends on your race. Mises had a name for that idea, and an answer to it. Wanjiru Njoya applies it to how we argue about race today.

A Nobel laureate says some markets are too repugnant to allow and need clever redesign instead. Sandy Klein has a simpler answer: repugnance is just a preference, and the price system already knows what to do with it.

No, it isn't Blackstone, and the boomers didn't take it all. Timothy Terrell separates the housing myths from the real reasons you can't afford a house.

Contemporary culture, with its fixation on careers, tends to downgrade the career of motherhood.

A trade deficit sounds like losing—buying more than you sell. Lucas Engelhardt on why that 200-year-old intuition is exactly backwards, and what a deficit actually means.

Rent control's cruelest irony: it makes discrimination cheaper. Joseph Salerno on the long-run effects of price caps that almost no one sees coming.

The textbook model of "perfect competition" bans advertising, price cuts, and better products—the very things we mean by competing. Tate Fegley on why the mainstream picture of monopoly is upside down.

The recession isn't the disease, it's the cure. Patrick Newman on why the Austrians blame the boom, not the bust, and trace it all to one cause.

Most Americans, unfortunately, believe that we are still living in the constitutional republic created in 1787. That was five republics ago.

When savers cut back and consumption falls, most economists cry "recession!" Paul Cwik on why an Austrian sees the opposite: an economy quietly retooling for future growth.

While many immigrants bring entrepreneurial skills, they often settle in US cities governed by leftists who are hostile to private enterprise.

The US government continues to drag down the economy with its reckless wars and massive debt accumulation. On the other side of the globe, China is pursuing a different path.