Recent Podcast Episodes

Politicians have long claimed that states are like big families, and that political regimes rule in ways similar to how parents raise their families. This is nonsense. 

Many “mainstream” economists are bothered by the popularity of economically-flawed policy proposals like tariffs and price controls. It’s their own fault.

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop are joined by Aaron Sobczak of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

The Salamanca School is known for important contributions to free-market economics and the Austrian School. The Bolognese jurists also made key contributions. 

Academic historians and archivists have been captured by the hard left and the DEI industry. Not only will the current trends make them bad historians, but it also makes them intolerant people. Mises knew better.

California's 2014 ban on “single-use” plastic bags was supposed to lead to less waste of plastic, which hasn't happened. Now environmentalists are demanding the state ban the same plastic bags mandated by the original legislation. One intervention begets another and another.

When our ruling classes speak of “believing in democracy,” they are speaking of a romantic version of a form of governance that, in real life, is quite different than the sanitized version presented in our media. 

What Murray Rothbard used to call the "Old Right" stood for liberty, freedom of speech, and a free economy. Most importantly, they stood for peace, all in contrast to the "liberals" of their day and ours.

The common belief regarding state power is that it is always justified and there can be no questioning the state's existence. But is that true? Does state power conform to natural law or is it imposed upon subjected people? 

The ruling elites of the US are calling for a "return" to "Hamiltonian Statecraft" and to move away from so-called isolationism. However, there has been no time since the end of World War II that the US has been anything but aggressive in its foreign policy.

The hatred and disparagement of gold as money and the gold standard has become standard dogma of the modern State.

David R. Henderson joins Bob to critique a recent Brad DeLong essay, which argued that the US had tried an experiment in "neo-liberalism" and that it failed utterly.

Ryan, Tho, and Jonathan Newman look at how the state and the media treat homeschooling and why parents are increasingly looking to homeschooling as an alternative. 

Yet another discouraging trend in law in the UK, Europe, and the US has been the criminalization of what authorities call “hate speech.” However, much of what passes for such “speech” is innocuous at worst and historically has been protected.

What is the source of our rights, natural Law or the state? Unfortunately, too many people who should know better choose the latter. David Gordon makes short work of their internal contradictions.

Keynesians are known for using obscure and jumbled jargon to explain their fallacious ideas. The hope being that, the more confusing the language, the greater the perceived scholarship. Good economics can and should be clearly logically explained.

Mainstream economists speak of GDP as though it is the economy itself, however, GDP is not a good measure of economic reality. Instead, it presents a distorted picture of genuine economic activity and leads to mistaken conclusions about the economy.

The US Armed Forces expand their footprints in the Indian Ocean, not to defend this country, but to expand military power. The Diego Garcia base has left a trail of ruined lives for those forced off their land to make room for yet another military base.

While the world is abuzz over artificial intelligence (AI), present technologies are limited more than most people want to believe. The situation is ripe for malinvestments.

Despite claims from progressive historians that US slavery was a natural outgrowth of a free market economy, the reality is that slavery would have been much costlier without governments—federal and state—subsidizing it. It is time to set the record straight.