Recent Podcast Episodes

A debate between Dr. Walter Block and Dr. Boyd Blundell at the Loyola Economics Club at Loyola University, New Orleans, in 2007.

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

We have today a hybrid of two forms of banking — loan banking (non-inflationary) and deposit banking (inflationary if not 100% reserve holdings).  The cause of booms is the credit expansion by central banks that is not backed by pools of private savings.

In the history of money, bartering was awkward because wants were not divisible. Direct exchange depended upon a double coincidence of wants. Demand for a medium of exchange grew until a general medium of exchange emerged, like gold and silver.

Competition can mean rivalry or freedom. All firms must serve the preferences of consumers in order to exist. Monopoly has historically been an artificial privilege granted by the state.

Causal-realist analysis allows imaginary constructs like the ERE — Evenly Rotating Economy — in order to isolate certain factors like interest.  There would be no profit or loss in the ERE, because those can only exist under conditions of uncertainty.

Time preference says that individuals prefer satisfaction now to later, present to future. This explains the loan market. In the structure of production, the capitalist pays wages now, despite the fact that he himself does not get paid until the final stage when the product actually comes to market.

As with all government intervention, price controls do not achieve what their originators think they will. Trying to maintain a supply of milk by putting a price control on it will cause shortages, which are the very situations the price manipulators said they wanted to avoid.

Factors of Production are economic goods: scarce means used to achieve an individual’s ends. They are land, labor and capital. Each is examined. Incomes are earned by factor owners as production takes place. There is no separated production and distribution.

All action is really exchange. What the actor prefers less is exchanged for something he prefers more, including gift giving. It is a fallacy to say that the goods exchanged have equal value.

What determines market prices? Buyers and sellers must know of feasible trades. They can learn from their mistakes. They prefer higher profits to lower profits. They think in discreet terms. Both participants win in market exchanges.

In this first lecture of a series of lectures covering the basics of applied Austrian economics,  Joseph Salerno introduces a number of basic concepts including utility, exchange, psychic cost, choice, value, and marginal utility. 

Robert Nozick, 1938-2002, was a professor at Harvard whose best known book is Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) – a libertarian answer to Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971). Murray Rothbard, 1926-1995, wrote The Ethics of Liberty as his main political philosophy work.

John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873, was the most famous classical liberal. Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903, was a prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. Lysander Spooner, 1808-1887, was an American individualist anarchist and abolitionist.

John Rawls, 1921-2002, was the most influential figure among American philosophers. His first, and main, work, A Theory of Justice (1971), made him famous. It aimed to resolve the seemingly competing claims of freedom and equality.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778, influenced the French Revolution with his political philosophy and his social contract theory. The perspective of many of today’s environmentalists can be traced back to Rousseau, espousing that all degenerates in man’s hands. The Social Contract (1972), his most important work, outlines the basis for a legitimate political order within a framework of classical republicanism.

Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804, was called the most evil person by Ayn Rand. His classical republican theory was extended in the Science of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). G.W.F. Hegel, 1770-1831, was definitely not a classical liberal.

Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.