Recent Podcast Episodes

From the book Speaking of Liberty, as narrated by the author, pp. 13-25.

From Speaking of Liberty, as narrated by the author, pp. 57-68.

Recorded at the Mises Circle in Houston, 4 March 2006.

Recorded at the Mises Circle in Houston, 4 March 2006.

Recorded at Mises University 2005.

We are living through a revolutionary moment, seeing the collapse of socialism at the end of the Twentieth Century.  Socialism lost its moral legitimacy. The force of modern technology required markets.

Presented to the Auburn University Libertarians; Auburn, Alabama, on 19 January 2005.

The essence of Austrian economics is based on the analysis of individual action. In other words, it is about individuals doing things, having purposes and goals and pursuing them. Other schools of economics deal with aggregates, groups, classes, wholes of one sort or another, without focusing on the individual first and building up from there.

Richard Cantillon was quite Misesian before Mises. He wrote of utility theory and the entrepreneur’s uncertainty in the 1970s. Cantillon was a great money practitioner. He became a bank and banker to the Jacobite Stuart line and to John Law who launched paper money inflation.

History is not an inevitable march upward, as concluded in the 1830s. That determinist view put the stamp of approval on everything past and present. It permeates economic history. It ignores the great moral choices. History is a race between state power and social power.

The Nobel award to F.A. Hayek in 1974 went directly against the tradition of that prize to go only to mathematical forecasters, left-liberals, and government central planners. Not only was Hayek’s work pioneering, but it is also the only correct analysis of business cycles past, present and future since they began in the mid-18th century.

Carl Menger, 1840-1921, founded Austrian economics. Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk was the most important student.  Weiser was his brother-in-law, but was fairly pre-Keynesian. Mises was the great successor to Bohn-Bawerk.

The roots of Marxism were in messianic communism. Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial point.  Violent, worldwide revolution, in Marx’s version made by the oppressed proletariat, would be the instrument of the advent of his millennium, communism.

Jeffrey Tucker interviews Robert Karl Mertin at the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, January 11, 2006.

What kind of man was Ludwig von Mises? Here is a film that does justice to this extraordinary man, and to his equally extraordinary ideas.

Interviewed by Jeffrey Tucker at the Mises Institute (Auburn, Alabama) 12/09/2005.

Walter Block and Bill Barnett Mises Institute Podcast

Recorded at the Mises Institute, 7–8 October 2005. 

Recorded at the Mises Institute, 7–8 October 2005. 

Recorded at the Mises Institute, 7–8 October 2005.