The Human Action Podcast

Professor Jonathan Newman joins the show for a look at America's Great Depression, Rothbard's classic explanation of a terrible period in US history. This book provides one of the best short surveys of Austrian business cycle theory, along with deep history surrounding the inflationary run-up of the 1920s and the disastrous mistakes made by the "laissez-faire" Hoover administration in the 1930s. A...

Scott Horton of antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute has a new book chronicling 20 years of America's "War on Terror." Enough Already is a compelling history of modern US interventionism and a scathing critique of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Horton joins Jeff Deist for a sobering look at American hubris overseas, along with the blowback and destruction it causes. You don't wan...

Guido Hülsmann's The Ethics of Money Production is a masterclass both on the fundamentals of money and the disastrous moral consequences of monetary "policy." Inflation is not only an economic problem which impoverishes us materially, but a deeply corrosive force in society for individuals. There is no better work to explain the broader implications of central banking which go almost totally unrem...

Tom Woods joins the show for a special year-end show to make the case for becoming a serious reader in 2021! Read Dr. David Gordon's 2020 book reviews at Mises.org/Gordon2020 Find all episodes of the Human Action Podcast at Mises.org/HAPod

Managerialism, not socialism or capitalism, dominated the West in the latter half of the 20th century. Nobody explained this better than James Burnham in his seminal 1941 book The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World. Burnham challenges both Marxist orthodoxy on class (exploitation happens without capitalism) and libertarian orthodoxy on market firms (managerial control overtakes...

Professor Janek Wasserman's book The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas, is an entertaining and fascinating account of key players and events in the evolution of Austrian school economics. Jeff Deist details the good, bad, and ugly of the book, written by a left-progressive historian from a critical perspective. Read Jeff Deist's review at Mises.org/DeistWass...

Ryan McMaken joins the show to discuss Adam Fergusson's seminal history of Weimar-era hyperinflation in Germany, When Money Dies. Americans accustomed to the dollar's king status have no idea how quickly and brutally a currency can lose value, especially when war finance distorts the entire structure of a nation's economy. What follows is sobering: hunger, violence, crime, and degradation. This fa...

Professor Per Bylund of Oklahoma State University is the author of The Seen, The Unseen, and the Unrealized. 2020 is the year social scientists failed to show us the unseen, namely the staggering and still unfolding economic, social, medical, and human costs of Covid lockdowns. Dr. Bylund and Jeff Deist discuss Covid and government responses against the backdrop of ripple effects, Say's law, "mark...

Do we fund government or does government fund us? Can sovereign states issue currency at will without risk of default? Are government deficits actually a form of public wealth? And can newly issued currency (rather than taxes or bonds) be used to pay for public works, health care, college, entitlements, and guaranteed jobs? These are the arguments made by Professor Stephanie Kelton in The Deficit...

Why don't elections bring harmony and closure rather than ever greater political friction? Han-Hermann Hoppe explained all of the fundamental problems with mass democracy more than 20 years ago in Democracy: The God That Failed. Jeff Deist finishes his series on this devastating classic with a look at Hoppe's final chapters, critiquing conservatism, liberalism, and constitutionalism. Why do both c...

Lawyer and libertarian theorist Stephan Kinsella joins the show to discuss the middle chapters of Hoppe's Democracy, The God That Failed—in particular dealing with "desocialization" of collective property, immigration, and free trade. These are the most controversial and widely-discussed parts of the book, and Kinsella provides a fascinating analysis of property vs. wealth, the problems with publi...

With an ugly presidential election just three weeks away, we dive into Hans Hoppe's classic Democracy: The God That Failed to puncture some of the myths surrounding democracy and voting. Jayant Bhandari joins the show to discuss Hoppe's controversial thesis concerning monarch and democracy, time preference and its manifestation in the two systems, the forces constraining monarchs, and the terrible...

Most of you know the great journalist Henry Hazlitt for his remarkable Economics in One Lesson. But in this episode, Jeff Deist discusses Hazlitt's virtually unknown 1942 book A New Constitution Now, which is nothing short of a how-to guide for remaking the US constitutional system. Hazlitt was concerned about FDR's third term and what it meant for presidential power, along with what he saw as the...

Professor Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard, is in the midst of writing a new textbook titled Principle of Economics. But he's writing it in open-source form: drafting, revising, and sharing the manuscript with his online students as the book is created. And unlike most lousy college economics textbooks, his offering is rooted in Austrian theory and contains numerous references to M...

We have reached the end of Murray Rothbard's definitive treatise Man, Economy, and State! Dr. Patrick Newman joins the show to wrap up the final chapters—labeled separately as Power and Market—showing Rothbard's economic analysis of government interventions. Newman and Jeff Deist discuss this quintessentially Rothbardian treatment of everything from price controls to taxes to subsidies to "public...

'Power and Market' was never meant to be an addendum to 'Man, Economy, and State', but a vital part of the book’s unbridled economic analysis of a truly free market — and a searing new typology of interventionism. Dr. Patrick Newman (Mises.org/PNewman) joins the show for a fascinating look at Rothbard’s groundbreaking conceptual work in private defense, private courts, and the stark realities of p...

By day Jeff Booth is an entrepreneur and builder of companies, but now he's written one of the most compelling and important books of 2020. The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future (mises.org/BoothBook) makes the case for a better and more prosperous world simply by accepting the natural order of falling prices and fast-improving technology. The book is entirely free o...

Economist Robert Murphy joins the show to cover Rothbard's excellent treatment of money in Chapter 11 of Man, Economy, and State. Dr. Murphy and Jeff cover why "hoarding" money is socially beneficial; why the velocity of money (and the famous MV=PT equation) is a useless concept, and how new money in society is never neutral. How and why does money maintain purchasing power, and does the interest...

When Murray Rothbard wrote Man, Economy, and State in the 1950s, monopoly theory was a mess. Even Mises did not have a full understanding of where neoclassical economics went wrong in diagnosing "market failure." But in Chapter 10 of his great treatise, Rothbard demolished the myths surrounding monopolies and cartels. His friend Dr. Walter Block joins the show to discuss Rothbard's breakthroughs a...

The Human Action podcast with Jeff Deist continues tracking Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State, this time focusing on the role of entrepreneurs in the production process (Chapter 8). Hunter Hastings joins the show with great insights into the social benefits of profit vs. interest, entrepreneurial risk, progressing and retrogressing economies, and the bunkum known as the "Paradox of Saving." This...

Kristoffer Hansen joins the show to discuss everything about interest rates, as detailed by Rothbard in Chapter 6 of Man, Economy, and State. Hansen and Jeff Deist cover the "pure" rate of interest, expressed via time preference, and why the temporal nature of production helps us understand the premium for present goods relative to future goods. Far from exploiting workers or borrowers, capitalist...

AOC and Paul Krugman are wrong: we can't just pay people money to stay home and expect "stuff" to materialize around us. This show explains why—as we cover Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State Chapter 5, "Production: The Structure," with our great friend Dr. Shawn Ritenour from Grove City College. Don't miss a great discussion of that critical missing link in mainstream economics—capital theory—and...

Today's solo show kicks off our reading of Rothbard's landmark Man, Economy, and State with a look at Chapter 1, "Fundamentals of Human Action." So much of what economics texts get wrong is laid out brilliantly here by Rothbard, who gives readers the basics of action, means/ends, time, ranking, factors of production, and capital in this 77 page master class. The short appendix at the end of the ch...

Rothbard fans, this is the podcast you don't want to miss! Rothbard scholar Patrick Newman joins Jeff Deist to kick off a series of shows featuring Rothbard's landmark treatise Man, Economy, and State. They discuss the history and background behind this important book, how it changed the landscape, and why the concluding chapters titled "Power and Market" proved so controversial at the time–and re...

We've reached the end of Human Action! Tom Woods joins the podcast to discuss Part Seven, "The Place of Economics in Society," and it's a show you don't want to miss. Woods and host Jeff Deist enjoy an engaging and far-ranging discussion of the book's place in history, Mises's frustration with economics co-opting the methods of physical sciences, and the public's seeming inability to overcome anti...