Recent Podcast Episodes

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.

In this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken looks at Rothbard's essay "Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation State." 

Human Action sold thousands of copies, earned accolades from across the political spectrum, and made zero acknowledged impression on the economics profession. Or did it?

A Libertarian Party presidential nominee said he was open to a carbon tax. Mises would have had a different suggestion, and Timothy Terrell explains what it was.

There are only three possible economic systems: capitalism, socialism, and interventionism. Mises spent his career proving the third is the least understood and the most dangerous.

A labor economist at the University of Chicago devoted his career to Veblen's institutionalism. When he finally saw through the foundations, he told a friend: all my work has been bunk.

Should banks contract credit during a bust? Mises said yes. Rothbard disagreed. Patrick Newman traces a subtle but consequential rift between master and student.

The engineer and the gambler both face uncertainty, but only one can control the forces involved. Jonathan Newman explores the gap between plan and outcome that drives all economic life.

Mises said the modern theory of value didn't just improve economics. It created an entirely new science: the general theory of human action.

Armen Alchian opened a seminar by reading a paragraph on property. Only one person in the room recognized it from Mises's Human Action. It changed everything.