The Human Action Podcast

Mises defined "liberalism" as rooted in property. Modern progressives and social justice warriors—mislabeled as "liberals"—attack property as an impediment to their program of radical egalitarianism. In their view, all human conduct must be viewed through the filters of identity politics, privilege, and undefinable concepts of social justice. Disagree with them and you'll find your campus building...

It's Memorial Day weekend, a time when we (hopefully) reflect on war rather than celebrate it. So it's the perfect opportunity to revisit an inspiring antiwar talk from our own Senior Fellow Tom Woods. You may not know it, but Tom was once a neocon who considered the libertarian position of noninterventionism unrealistic and naive. But his mind was changed by none other than the late Murray Rothba...

Jeff Deist joins Joshua Bennett on the Patriots Lament show (KFAR AM 660, Fairbanks) and gives his thoughts on the 2016 election. Jeff discusses how the ultimate outcome of any election season is greater division among society, and argues that libertarians should focus on making the case for decentralizing power. Liberty will never come from the White House, but from winning over the hearts and mi...

This weekend, Jeff Deist and John O'Donnell discuss central banking and culture. We tend to think of central banking as a dry subject for professional economists, rather than a cultural and even moral issue. But the Fed and other central banks create huge moral hazards, degrade longstanding social mores like hard work and thrift, and encourage economic hedonism today at the expense of tomorrow. Ev...

Thirty-five years ago, Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman published 'The Case for Gold', their minority report from Reagan's gold commission. Today, Jim Rickards has written 'The New Case for Gold', an uncompromising call for using gold as money and reestablishing a gold standard for central banks. In this wide-ranging interview, Jeff Deist and Jim Rickards discuss gold in the context of current geopoliti...

Our guest is Daniel McAdams, head of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Daniel is a foreign policy expert, having worked for many years on Capitol Hill and as an election monitor in eastern Europe. Daniel and Jeff discuss the role Dr. Paul played in creating the noninterventionist populism visible in both the Trump and Sanders campaigns, and how the public now sees the Iraq war as a...

At this year's AERC, Dr. Michel Accad, who practices cardiology and internal medicine in San Francisco, presented a fascinating paper fusing Misesian insights with medicine. Dr. Accad highlights how viewing "the body as a machine" has played a major role in the rise of medical paternalism and one-size-fits all treatment. Dr. Accad instead proposes a praxeological framework for medicine, with healt...

Weaving Austrian insights together with firsthand knowledge of technological innovation, Hunter outlines how the technology of the “cognitive assistant” can help empower entrepreneurship and usher in a new age of individualism.

Dr. Guido Hülsmann joins us this weekend to discuss the ongoing migrant crisis in Europe. We consider what Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe have to say about borders, migration controls, organic nations, and culture. Dr. Hülsmann also explains the critical difference between nation and state, and why so-called "public property"should be controlled for the benefit of taxpayers. Are the arguments for the...

Central banks — and central bankers — are in uncharted waters. They don't know how to create economic growth, they don't know how to fight the great bogeyman of deflation, and they don't know how — or if — they'll ever be able to return to a time of "normal" monetary policy. Their pretense of knowledge, of being able to effectively control currencies used by billions of people, is coming to an end...

On this week's episode, we feature a past talk given by Hans-Hermann Hoppe highlighting some of the key points he makes in his book 'Democracy: The God That Failed'. The subject seems particularly topical as American elites have become increasingly comfortable dropping the façade of democracy, with the Washington establishment becoming increasingly transparent in their intentions to undercut the s...

Murray Rothbard would have celebrated his 90th birthday this past week, so the Mises Institute held a reception in his honor at the ISFLC conference in Washington DC. Joining us to explain why Rothbard remains so relevant today is University of Manchester professor Matt McCaffrey, a former Mises Institute Fellow and editor of our new Rothbard Reader (https://mises.org/RothbardReader). Matt discuss...

This weekend, Jeff recaps his recent talk in Houston entitled "Socialist Left vs. alt-Right: What it Means for Liberty" (https://youtu.be/NxkV-A5dBZc)—a talk which generated plenty of comments from libertarians, progressives, and the alt-Right. Jeff discusses why we should celebrate the death of supposed "democratic consensus," why the progressive left doesn't care about winning votes, how the alt...

The concept of negative interest rates, already adopted in Japan, is now under serious consideration in Europe and the US. Here to make sense of this bizarre environment is Paul-Martin Foss, head of the Carl Menger Center and a regular contributor to mises.org. Paul-Martin explains how Mises and Rothbard understood the function of interest rates, as opposed to how central bankers use interest rate...

The late Murray Rothbard is in many ways the godfather of the modern libertarian movement, starting with the publication of his great tract 'Man, Economy, and State,' back in 1962. And of course, Rothbard played an instrumental role in helping Lew Rockwell get the Mises Institute off the ground. This weekend's show features a great panel discussion about Murray—not just the economist and the intel...

On this week’s episode, we feature a talk by Dr. Ron Paul at the Mises Circle in Houston. Dr. Paul gives a great speech on the ideas of liberty, and also includes a reference to how Bernie Sanders doesn’t seem to understand that the Plymouth colony experiment in America was actually a failure.

On this week's episode we feature a 2011 talk at the Mises Institute given by Hans-Hermann Hoppe on the subject of praxeology: the science of human action. It's a term and topic that can be intimidating to some people — and at nearly 50 minutes, Hoppe's talk is quite a bit longer than our usual weekend show — but it is vitally important to understand why praxeology is the proper economic methodolo...

Our guest this weekend is Dr. Mark Thornton, a senior fellow here at the Mises Institute, and our topic is booms and busts. Falling stock prices are in the news lately, so Mark and Jeff talk about how and why central bankers don't understand deflation, whether they are really Keynesians or some variant thereof, what a "crack-up boom" might look like, and what the Skyscraper Index and other forms o...

Our guest this weekend is Dr. Joe Salerno, academic vice president at the Mises Institute, and professor of economics at Auburn University. Jeff and Joe discuss monetary policy and gold on the heels of yet another GOP presidential primary debate. It appears that not even Rand Paul is going to be able to generate much interest in the Fed or in monetary policy, generally, in the 2016 cycle. Ted Cruz...

You may have heard about the Swiss referendum to end fractional reserve lending by Swiss commercial banks. It's a fascinating development for Austrians and libertarians, and it's another example of how average Swiss people can use referenda to force both their central legislature and the twenty-six Swiss cantons to consider their proposals, merely by gathering 100,000 signatures within an 18-month...

Our show this weekend features Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Distinguished Scholar in Law and Jurisprudence at the Mises Institute and Senior Judicial Analyst at Fox News. In this talk presented at the 2014 Mises Circle in Costa Mesa, California, Judge Napolitano lays out the difference between Natural Law and Legislative Law.

Our guest this week is Judge John Denson, the great war historian and lawyer who helped Lew Rockwell found the Mises Institute in the early 1980s. In celebration of Christmas, Judge Denson and I discuss the infamous World War I truce that took place between British and German soldiers in December of 1914 — and how the 20th century may have been radically different, and radically less bloody, if th...

This weekend, we feature a lecture by Dr. Robert Murphy that was recorded at our inaugural Mises Boot Camp this past summer, where Bob gave an introductory talk that sets the Austrian framework, and lays out how we should go about understanding economics. It's a great refresher for those who are familiar with the Austrian school, but it's also a great primer to share with your friends who are no s...

In honor of the 24th anniversary of the Soviet Union's collapse, our guest this weekend is our old friend Dr. Yuri Maltsez, a senior fellow here at the Mises Institute and a professor of Economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Yuri is famous for having been a Soviet economist during the Gorbachev era and defecting to the United States. Yuri and Jeff discuss Trump-ism, the Bernie Sande...

Our returning guest this weekend is Łukasz Dominiak, a professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland, and also a former summer fellow at the Mises Institute. Jeff and Łukasz discuss the recent elections in Poland, as well as the street protests that you might not have heard about in western media. There is actually something very different happening in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland,...