Recent Podcast Episodes

Delivered as part of the Mises Institute’s Summer Seminar Series.

Jeffrey Tucker interviews Dr. Robert P. Murphy about Education on June 28th, 2005.

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 had criminalized excessive criticism of government.  Jefferson feared it would be used in a partisan way. The Acts violated the Tenth Amendment by encroaching on a state prerogative.

FDR’s stated New Deal purpose was to keep work weeks short and to extend minimum wages which were extremely high. But, production is what makes demand possible and what increases purchasing power, not federal mandates.

This is a difficult issue. Most of the controversy is from Section One. What exactly does the first sentence mean? If the Fourteenth Amendment was in fact intended to bind the states to the Bill of Rights that the federal government could enforce, then it dramatically increases the police power of the federal government.

No President should leave a citizen in doubt about his person or property. However, this original comforting view is contrasted with more modern theory of the Presidency in which Wilson held the President to be the “unifying force of the country”. He represents no constituency, but the “whole people”.

The compact theory holds that self-governing sovereign states have rights to protect themselves, whereas the nationalist theory holds that nullification or secession would be insubordination. Nationalists view states as a single whole with no boundaries and a single aggregated people.

The standard tale of labor history in American is largely false. Unions did not cause a rising standard of living. Employers were forbidden to encourage union membership, but they could compel union membership.

The 1920s had difficulties, but the depth of the Great Depression was in 1931. Any theory of boom-bust events must ask why so many entrepreneurs made terrible errors in a cluster. Why do busts hit capital goods industries harder than they do consumer goods industries?

The Mexican War 1846-48 involved unpaid debts to Americans, a desire for West coast territory, and the issue of Texas whose independence was not recognized by Mexico. The Southern boundary was in dispute also.

New England was not in favor of the War of 1812 and it considered seceding, but the death of Hamilton in his duel with Burr destroyed that plan. The idea of secession was more embraced by the Northern than by the Southern states.

Up until the 1930s there was freedom of contract between workers and employers by which they could make, accept, or reject any offers of remuneration. With the 1930s comes the idea of exclusive bargaining agents decided upon by a majority of workers, and compulsory to all.

Recorded at the Mises Institute on 15 June 2005.

Recorded at Mises University 2004.

Recorded at Mises University 2004.

Interviewed by Jeffrey Tucker at the Mises Institute; June 13, 2005. 

The mythology of gold really grew up with Keynes and the quantity theory. Here are six of those myths: the gold standard is unable to accommodate the needs of an growing economy; the quantity of money is arbitrarily determined; the gold standard is a government price fixing scheme; the gold standard subjects a country to alternating inflation and deflation; the gold standard requires high costs devoted to resources; and the gold standard results in high interest rates.

Friedman’s book, Monetary History of the United States, tried to show the depression was caused by a deflation of the money supply by the Fed. Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression was published the next year in 1963. Rothbard argued that the Fed was actively inflating the money supply.

The founder of the Chicago School, Frank Knight, was an avowed egalitarian. Rousseau was his influence. Jacobins believed in mass democracy and politics as the only way to implement their ideas. They hated aristocrats and religious leaders. Knight believed in progressive taxation. He wanted neocon social democracy.