Recent Podcast Episodes

Without money, specialization is constrained; without money, dreams of constructing an advanced society are merely a utopian pipe dream.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Nixon's gold shock, The Fiat Standard is an amazing explication of how the West fell to its current state. You don't want to miss this show, especially Saifedean's epic takedown of fiat academia at the end!

The outcome of today's currency race is uncertain. The credibility of the leading fiat currencies has suffered substantially. Their instability has fueled crises and weakened growth, so the demand for an alternative store of value is high. 

Stagnation is real, but it isn’t “secular”—that is, sluggish growth doesn’t have to happen. The coming stagnation isn’t foreordained; it is simply the inevitable outcome of a progressive agenda that disdains free enterprise. 

Countless Americans have been repeatedly told to “follow the science,” supposedly to prove they are not obstinately closed-minded. But the main purpose of it all was just to open people’s minds to what government bureaucrats wanted. 

The cognitive dissonance of American academia and journalism is on full display in this survey.

Political candidates are offering endless government spending and "free stuff" for everyone. But at the same time, governments appear incapable of performing even basic duties like ending street riots. 

Fannie and Freddie were long quasi-government corporations that typified the corrupt union between the feds and corporate America. But now it looks like both companies are just full-on government corporations. 

The Fed isn’t here to take away the punch bowl anymore. The Fed is the punch bowl. 

An increase in the supply of money does not necessarily cause the boom-bust cycle. It is only when more money is created out of nothing that the cycle begins. 

Unlike the ongoing price inflation that is typically caused by central-bank expansion of the money supply, the price inflation generated by diminished supplies of goods is a one-shot affair. 

The federal government collects a lot more in taxes than the state governments do. And the feds also spend a lot more. This tells us a lot about how the federal government came to dominate all political systems in America. 

The SALT tax deduction allows state and local taxes—like property taxes—to be deducted from federal taxes. To cap it is to pave the way for the federal government to tax income twice.

The experts claimed that if any state ended its stay-at-home orders “prematurely,” its economy would become even more devastated than if it remained locked down. The experts were wrong. 

“Mortgage companies have ramped up their purchases of government-backed mortgages in forbearance, and they are selling these loans back to investors at a profit.”

Mises.org editors Tho Bishop and Ryan McMaken join the show to explain the tremendous descriptive power of this essay, and why we need Rothbard as much as Burnham, Machiavelli, or Sun Tzu when it comes to strategy. 

The chronic US trade deficit is a direct result of the dollar’s status as the world’s main reserve currency and unabated monetary increases in government spending. More tariffs won't change that. 

Why have prices of building materials soared while consumer prices are relatively stable? This is easier to understand once we reject the myth of monetary neutrality and see how price inflation enters the market in different ways. 

Peter Schiff is a well-known critic of bitcoin, and while he is an excellent resource on many economic and political topics, he misses the mark on cryptocurrency.

Wokeness may now be a public relations strategy—a method of appealing to the moral sensibilities of the upper-middle-class woke American consumer.