The Human Action Podcast

Governments, at least modern western governments, have always hated cash transactions. Cash is private, and cash is hard to tax. So politicians trump up phony reasons like drug trafficking and money laundering to win support for bad laws like the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which makes even small cash transactions potentially reportable to the Feds. Today cash is under attack like never before. Ultr...

James Grant, of 'Grant's Interest Rate Observer', recently joined us at our event in Stamford, Connecticut to discuss his new book 'The Forgotten Depression'. If you've never heard of the Depression of 1921, it's because the federal government and the (then new) Federal Reserve did the opposite of what they did in 2008: federal spending was cut, the federal budget was balanced, and interest rates...

Our guest this week is uniquely qualified to discuss modern progressives from a libertarian perspective. Jim Ostrowski, whom Murray Rothbard called "one of the finest people in the libertarian movement," is a lawyer, writer, activist, and chronicler of progressive dysfunction in his native New York. He's the author of 'Progressivism: A Primer on the Idea Destroying America', which explains progres...

David Stockman is our guest this week in the second of a two-part interview. Stockman was a congressman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and a private equity fund manager who saw the devastation brought to American companies by an economy built on cheap debt instead of real productivity. His book 'The Great Deformation' is a tour de force exposé of crony capitalism, an indictment of Treasury Depa...

David Stockman is our guest this week in the first of a two-part interview. Stockman was a congressman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and a private equity fund manager who saw the devastation brought to American companies by an economy built on cheap debt instead of real productivity. His book 'The Great Deformation' is a tour de force exposé of crony capitalism, an indictment of Treasury Depar...

In this first installment of a two-part interview, Jeff Deist and Joseph T. Salerno discuss the health and vitality of the Austrian school, the impact of the South Royalton conference, Joe's relationship with and memories of Rothbard, and why so many factions seem to persist within Austrian economics. Joe also gives some great insights into the state of academia, whether it's wise for libertarians...