Recent Podcast Episodes

Are we living in a decidedly anti-intellectual age, or has America always been predisposed toward doers over thinkers? Don't miss this fascinating but sobering discussion.

Benjamin Boyce talks with Bob about the lessons we can learn as the rest of the country follows the same trajectory of identity politics.

Both Ludwig von Mises and Abraham Maslow understood that unless we first secure the benefits of economic progress, it becomes impossible to pursue higher human wants and needs.

If we’re going to ask ourselves what might have caused such an unusually large rise in homicide, we ought to look for very unusual events. Covid lockdowns certainly fit the bill. 

If deficits don't matter, why bother with taxes? The regime has the answer: taxes are important for punishing people we don't like, rewarding our friends, and for maintaining control over the public. 

The reliability and service life of the F-35 were greatly exaggerated in earlier reports. Now the aircraft is looking like an even bigger boondoggle than before. 

Francis Beckwith explains the many threats to natural rights that have evolved out of political authorities' refusal to recognize the meaning and importance of religious rites. 

Electing better planners won't make socialism work. Central planning fails because planning without the feedback mechanisms of the market is an impossible task.

By embedding victim-centered justice in law, lack of due process will become institutionalized. The burden of this will fall on men, and in particular black men.

In some cultures, entrepreneurial achievement and capital accumulations are viewed with high levels of suspicion and envy. This can be disastrous for economic progress. 

If you were to browse the economics sections of bookstores here in my home city, Dublin, you would find a wide variety of books by anticapitalist celebrity economists. Books by free market economists? Not so much. 

Daniel McCarthy joins the show to continue last week's discussion of the rapid breakdown of America's political order, with wokeism rising on the Left and Reaganism dying on the Right.

In this plenary address from the 2021 Austrian Economic Research Conference, Samuel Bostaph, an economist and historian of economic thought, discusses how Ludwig von Mises preserved and developed the work of Carl Menger. 

Centralizing political power in the hands of the state government only sets the stage for abuses when a new administration takes over. 

“Poverty in society is overcome by productivity, and in no other way. There is no political alchemy which can transmute diminished production into increased consumption.”

In this plenary address from the 2021 Austrian Economic Research Conference, Douglas B. Rasmussen speaks on some of the philosophical principles behind Rothbard's work with the action axiom. 

When Georgia and Florida scaled back covid restrictions, the experts predicted far more death in the "open states" than in the locked down states like New York and California. The numbers tell a different story.

Rob Bradley explains the role of Sam Insull (co-founder of General Electric) in showing what a free market in electricity would look like, and criticizes Texas’ ERCOT as a central planning agency.

Few political follies are more hazardous than presuming that one’s liberties are forever safe. If liberty is God’s gift to humanity, then why were most people who ever lived on Earth denied this divine bequest?

Josiah Neeley and Bob Murphy have a lively discussion, arguing on some of Bob’s previously articulated points regarding the recent Texas freeze and blackouts.