Recent Podcast Episodes

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.

On this episode of Power & Market, Tho, Connor, and special guest Ryan Turnipseed pay tribute to the Maestro, consider whether Democratic Socialists are part of Greenspan's legacy, and embrace Justice Clarence Thomas as a Rothbard respecter.

The common belief is that intellectual property rights must be in place, otherwise, entrepreneurs would be reluctant to face uncertain profitability. Well, entrepreneurs already face uncertainty and act, anyway.

Democratic Socialists are winning election after election and will have a number of representatives in Congress. What will happen to our society as they continue to gain power? The answers are not encouraging.

The Fed Chair’s job isn’t to stabilize the economy. It’s to use prestige, technical jargon, and mind-numbing dullness to cover for the central bank’s expropriation of the American people. And Alan Greenspan excelled at that.

Long before modern economics, the Greek philosophers were laying the groundwork for understanding human cooperation in a social setting, helping to give birth to economic thinking.

Social, economic, and political problems are intertwined and complex and require a grand theory to address them. For Rothbard, the unifying theme of social theory was liberty.

The intellectual path from Ancient Greece to modernity is littered with the path of numerous philosophers, movements, and events, both peaceful and violent that have shaped thinking throughout the ages.