Recent Podcast Episodes

Everyone wants the one key to economic growth—capital, or technology, or trade. Shawn Ritenour argues there is no single key, and that's exactly what the models keep missing.

Washington locked up timberland to stop deforestation, while taxing Canadian lumber, which meant felling more American trees. Timothy Terrell on conservation policy, and following the money.

Marx said your logic depends on your class. The Nazis said it depends on your race. Mises had a name for that idea, and an answer to it. Wanjiru Njoya applies it to how we argue about race today.

A Nobel laureate says some markets are too repugnant to allow and need clever redesign instead. Sandy Klein has a simpler answer: repugnance is just a preference, and the price system already knows what to do with it.

No, it isn't Blackstone, and the boomers didn't take it all. Timothy Terrell separates the housing myths from the real reasons you can't afford a house.

Contemporary culture, with its fixation on careers, tends to downgrade the career of motherhood.

A trade deficit sounds like losing—buying more than you sell. Lucas Engelhardt on why that 200-year-old intuition is exactly backwards, and what a deficit actually means.

Rent control's cruelest irony: it makes discrimination cheaper. Joseph Salerno on the long-run effects of price caps that almost no one sees coming.

The textbook model of "perfect competition" bans advertising, price cuts, and better products—the very things we mean by competing. Tate Fegley on why the mainstream picture of monopoly is upside down.

The recession isn't the disease, it's the cure. Patrick Newman on why the Austrians blame the boom, not the bust, and trace it all to one cause.

Most Americans, unfortunately, believe that we are still living in the constitutional republic created in 1787. That was five republics ago.

When savers cut back and consumption falls, most economists cry "recession!" Paul Cwik on why an Austrian sees the opposite: an economy quietly retooling for future growth.

While many immigrants bring entrepreneurial skills, they often settle in US cities governed by leftists who are hostile to private enterprise.

The US government continues to drag down the economy with its reckless wars and massive debt accumulation. On the other side of the globe, China is pursuing a different path.

The socialist calculation problem isn't a museum piece from 1920s Moscow. It's the Bureau of Land Management, this year. Timothy Terrell on why bureaucrats are still groping in the dark.

Why did so many American colonials take arms against the ruling British, even when the odds were stacked against them? Dr. Wanjiru Njoya looks into the competing ideological claims that go with analyzing the American Revolution.

Interest isn't the price of borrowing money or the reward for productive capital. It's the price we put on now over later. Jeffrey Herbener on time preference and the theory of interest.

The growing power of the centralized state loomed as the central problem for liberalism in the early nineteenth century, and the works of these three writers are a response to it.

Your bank says the money in your checking account is yours, available in full, any time. Its own balance sheet says it's holding a fraction of it. Jonathan Newman on what banks actually do with your deposits.

Try paying for a roof in moonwalk lessons. That's the problem money solves. Sandy Klein on why barter fails and how gold became money.