Recent Podcast Episodes

Dr. Jonathan Newman presents Hayek's "Why the Worst Get on Top", a critique of socialism distinct from the calculation and knowledge problems — showing that collectivism structurally selects the most ruthless for power.

Dr. Mark Thornton presents Hayek's "Choice in Currency," which diagnoses inflation as an ancient superstition revived by Keynes and proposes a radical remedy — letting people freely choose their money — now finding modern expression in cryptocurrency and the return to gold.

Mark Thornton argues the AI data-center bond boom is the latest techno bubble—cheap-money malinvestment dressed up as a new era.

Economist Jeffery Degner joins Ryan McMaken to discuss why government plans to increase the birth rate have never actually worked. But offering to give voters free money for having children is often good politics.

Dr. Mark Thornton called the housing bubble in 2004. For four years, he was told he was wrong. He now says every paper-dollar asset you own is facing a very difficult future, and the AI buildout is the clearest warning sign he has seen since.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, many seek to rehabilitate the War on Terror by appealing to the horror of 9/11, the right to respond, and the ideal of fighting terrorism. Many now demand that we judge an idealized “War on Terror” by its intentions rather than the war that actually occurred.

On this episode of Power and Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho discuss what appears to be a coordinated call to regulate AI. Is this a benevolent plea to save humanity, or a thinly veiled attempt to establish a cartel?

The top AI CEOs aren't acting like they genuinely believe their technology will soon cause human extinction. But they are acting like the successful cartelizers of history, who recognized that state power is the best way to protect market dominance.

Both Brazil and the US had slavery in the 1800s, but the US economy flourished while Brazil’s languished. If slavery was the engine for US economic growth, as leftists claim, then why didn’t Brazil's economy match that of the US?

The latest reminder of the Federal Reserve's record of failure, which now extends longer than five years, comes with the most recent inflation measure.

Dr. Thornton paints a dire picture of the global economy, arguing that widespread socialist policies are driving governments to extreme borrowing, money printing, and protectionism.

In the name of “saving” college sports, Congress steps well past its bounds to micromanage the NCAA.

Lenin wrote that the capitalists would provide the rope by which they would hang themselves. That certainly seems to be the case with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which received strong financial help from the center of crony capitalism itself: Wall Street.

By the close of the 1920s, business elites led by Wall Street had secured government enforcement of their cartels across banking, industry, transportation, and health.

World War I wrecked European finance and opened the door for the dollar to displace the pound. Patrick Newman follows Thomas Lamont and Paul Warburg’s ambitions for an imperial banking system, the Fed’s first inflationary boom and bust, and the 1920s high tide of the Money Lords.

The Beef Trust, the pure-food coalition, and the American Medical Association: three campaigns waged in the name of public health.

Barred from rate associations after 1897, the railroads formed communities of interest by buying their competitors’ stock—cartels in a disguised form.

Patrick Newman traces the Federal Trade Commission’s cartelizing arc: “advance advice,” uniform cost accounting, a brief Wilson reversal, Harding-Coolidge recapture, and Hoover’s subsidies and patent restrictions.

After the merger wave of 1898 and 1899, big business wanted relief from antitrust suits and protection from price-cutting.

Patrick Newman covers Jekyll Island, the National Citizens’ League organized as a front to manufacture grass-roots support, and the pivot once Congress refused the Aldrich plan.