Mises Media

The neoliberal establishment has done much to define our highly-interventionist, inflationary, and crony system as true free-market capitalism. They shouldn't be surprised, therefore, that people are turning against it.Read the article here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-neoliberals-fueled-rise-socialism2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure through September 30. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/gabfreebookBe sure to follow the Guns and Butter podcast at https://Mises.org/GB

The term that best describes the CEO of the "private" company Flock is "parasite" or "plutocrat" or "welfare queen" because his "business model" is simply finding ways to exploit the taxpayers.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/no-flock-not-really-private-company

Can fighting a war ever be just? Murray Rothbard dealt with that question and, of course, had some definitive answers.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/ethical-foundations-just-war-doctrine

Federal Reserve policy has been to expand credit out of nothing without regard for the real damage it does to the economy.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/credit-out-thin-air-brings-wealth-destruction

The future of Flock cameras: left the house during a pandemic lockdown? Expect a summons in the mail. Exceeding your "carbon footprint" by driving too much? Expect a ticket in the mail.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/high-cost-automated-flock-camera-surveillance-state

Rothbard collects the smaller remedies that circulated during the depression, chief among them internal improvements as relief for the unemployed. Pennsylvania's legislature debated a $660,000 roads appropriation defended explicitly as a jobs program, with one sponsor arguing that public debt was harmless because it would "circulate among the members of the same body." New Jersey took up the Delaware and Raritan Canal; North Carolina's Archibald Murphey proposed financing improvements with new paper money. A lone Pennsylvania representative asked why the men demanding the projects would not fund them with their own capital.

Rothbard draws the threads together and challenges the standard historiography. The inflation-versus-hard-money battle cut across region, class, wealth, and occupation—in Tennessee, the two opposing camps were led by wealthy cotton planters from the same city, and several inflationist governors reversed themselves after seeing their paper depreciate. He traces the lasting consequences: the protective movement's 1824 victory, the discrediting of state inconvertible paper, and the conversion of Jackson, Benton, Polk, Kendall, and Condy Raguet to hard money during these years. He closes by arguing that the Panic of 1819 helped launch American economics as a discipline, and left a permanent mark on how the country thought about money, debt, and depression.

The depression revived a dormant tariff movement and turned it into something close to a crusade. Rothbard follows Matthew Carey and the Philadelphia protectionists as they organized conventions, flooded Congress with memorials, and pressed the claim that free trade caused depression and protection would restore full employment. A high tariff bill was narrowly defeated in the Senate in 1820, along with companion measures to tax auction sales and end credit on import duties. The free-trade opposition, centered in the export-dependent South and New England shipping, countered that tariffs would deepen the collapse in commerce and agriculture, and that burdens on consumption should be reduced in a depression, not raised. The protectionists lost in 1820 and won in 1824.

The hard-money response held that excessive bank credit had caused the depression and that only rigid specie payment could end it. Rothbard catalogs the remedies proposed: confining banks to commercial cities, prohibiting small-denomination notes, barring interbank borrowing, forfeiting charters at the first refusal to redeem. Virginia's statesmen—Jefferson among them, along with Spencer Roane and the editor Thomas Ritchie—were the most uncompromising. This chapter also documents the American formulation of the currency principle and a monetary theory of the business cycle several years ahead of Thomas Joplin in England, and traces the hostility to the Second Bank of the United States that came from hard-money and soft-money camps alike.

A smaller but more theoretically ambitious group looked past the states to a national inconvertible currency. Rothbard examines their schemes in detail: suspension of specie payments by the Bank of the United States, permanent abandonment of redemption, and the elaborate proposal of "An Anti-Bullionist," who anticipated a specie-exchange standard with a government board regulating note issue against foreign exchange rates. Thomas Law of Washington emerged as the movement's leading advocate. None of the plans reached a vote, but Treasury Secretary Crawford's reluctant rejection of the idea provoked some of the sharpest monetary analysis of the era.

Because banks were chartered by the states, the monetary fight was fought mainly in state legislatures, and Rothbard follows it across the Union. Proposals ranged from the modest—permitting failing banks to suspend specie payment while continuing to operate—to the radical creation of state-owned banks and loan offices issuing inconvertible paper. Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee went the full distance. Some states even attempted to outlaw the depreciation of bank notes by statute. The results converted several prominent inflationists, including future leaders of the Jacksonian hard-money movement.

The debtors' plight was the most visible face of the depression, and the most politically explosive. Rothbard traces two distinct battles: the federal question of the $23 million owed on public land purchases, where Congress and President Monroe moved to forgive interest and permit relinquishment; and the state-level fight over stay laws and minimum appraisal laws, which spread through eight and four states respectively. Relief advocates argued that the rising purchasing power of the dollar had made repayment unjust. Their opponents answered that shielding debtors would destroy creditor confidence and prolong the very depression it aimed to cure.

Rothbard sets the stage with a portrait of a young agrarian republic transformed by the War of 1812. Foreign trade collapsed and domestic manufacturing surged; loosely regulated state banks multiplied, issuing notes with little specie behind them; credit poured into western land purchases at inflated prices. When the Second Bank of the United States reversed course and forced contraction, the whole structure came down. This chapter supplies the economic environment for everything that follows, and answers a question of lasting theoretical interest: was 1819 a genuine business-cycle depression of the modern type?

Rothbard opens by establishing why the Panic of 1819 matters: it was the first American crisis that could not be pinned on a specific act of government, and thus the first that looked recognizably modern. Confronted with something new, Americans went searching for causes and cures in newspapers, pamphlets, and legislative halls. Rothbard explains that the editors of the day were among the nation's leading economists, and that their debates form a rich and largely untapped record of a people learning to think about depression for the first time.

The Trump administration's crackdown on students protesting against Israel has once again run into the law, this time in the form of a federal court ruling against the government.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/trump-censorship-machine-loses-again-court

The Federal Reserve's fixation with “stable prices” has led to an unstable economy for the past century. Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/fallacy-stable-prices

The movement toward liberty has roots in two eras, neither of which saw much liberty. One lineage comes from the Enlightenment while the other emanates from ancient philosophers.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/two-lineages-liberty

Not even your Roomba vacuum cleaner is safe from state control. Time for the state to give up all economic controls across the board.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/state-coming-your-roomba

Mark Thornton opens with a warning from Jackson Hole: the Fed's public mandate is a cover story. Its real job is to serve the big banks and the state by keeping deficits, debt, and financial markets afloat through the power of printability. New programs, wars, bailouts, and political promises all become easier when the Fed can create money with keyboard entries, while consumers pay later through higher prices, unemployment, and crisis. On Side B, Thornton joins Wall Street Bullion to discuss gold, silver, commodity prices, the long-term consequences of paper money, the burden facing younger Americans, and the dangers of hyperinflation. He explains why boom-bust cycles begin with central bank credit expansion, why dollar-denominated assets become vulnerable in an inflationary environment, and why a bottom-up approach—sound money, savings, local resilience, and real assets—matters now.See also "Tightwads at the Fed" (Minor Issues, Episode 56) https://mises.org/podcasts/minor-issues/tightwads-fed2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure through September 30. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/issuesfree20% off listener offer on the insulated Minor Issues tumbler and three of Mark's books: https://mises.org/MinorIssuesTumbler. Use coupon code Thornton.Be sure to follow Minor Issues at https://Mises.org/MinorIssues

There are two types of nationality. The first, as defined by Ludwig von Mises, involves people united by common languages and customs. The second is defined by the state.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/nationality-you-belong-state

In America, French-style violence was simply unnecessary for the revolutionaries to win, and we will never know if the Americans might have resorted to greater violence in different circumstances. Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/three-reasons-why-french-revolution-was-so-different-american-revolution

Trump has made his family billions by courting foreign and corporate money and accepting extravagant gifts while in office. But he didn't bring self-enrichment to Washington, he simply made it much harder to ignore.Read the article here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/profiting-government-didnt-begin-trump2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar through August 31. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/gabfreebookBe sure to follow the Guns and Butter podcast at https://Mises.org/GB

California is looking to impose a new wealth tax to fleece the state's billionaires. While supporters of the tax claim it will raise more than $100 billion, if passed, it likely will crash in the same manner that wealth taxes in other countries like Sweden and Colombia have done.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/wealth-tax-revival-repeating-failed-experiment

The modern way of dealing with criminal behavior has been mass incarceration, yet crime abounds. Murray Rothbard believed that restitution and other methods were superior to the present state-run system.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/penal-leviathan-what-wacquant-and-rothbard-reveal-about-modern-punishment

As long as the explanation for human behavior seems logical and fits their worldview, people can carry on mistakenly believing that they can identify causal relations from studying group disparities.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/importance-teleology-understanding-economic-inequality

Contained within Rothbard's multi-volume history of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty, is an extended argument against the dominant conservative narrative on the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/rothbard-vs-conservatives-american-and-french-revolutions

Mark Thornton opens with an interview from the Rothbard Graduate Seminar on what makes Austrian economics distinct, why the Mises Institute matters, and how Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, and Austrian business cycle theory help students understand prices, capital, interest rates, socialism, skyscrapers, and the K-shaped economy. He emphasizes Austrian economics as a coherent, deductive approach rooted in human action and useful far beyond economics departments.On Side B, Mark joins VRIC Media and CapitalCosm to discuss the Fed, oil, government debt, Social Security, younger voters, and the future of the dollar. He argues that the Fed's real priorities are financing government debt and protecting banks and Wall Street.The transcript of the interview with Recep Kocyigit, "Skyscrapers, Böhm-Bawerk, and the K-Shaped Economy: A Conversation with Dr. Mark Thornton," is available in PDF: https://mises.org/MI_191_PDF2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar through August 31. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/issuesfree20% off listener offer on the insulated Minor Issues tumbler and three of Mark's books: https://mises.org/MinorIssuesTumbler. Use coupon code Thornton.Be sure to follow Minor Issues at https://Mises.org/MinorIssues

A common misconception about the French Revolution is that it was some sort of classical liberal or libertarian revolution.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-french-revolution-was-not-libertarian-revolution

This week, Bob talks with Dr. Patrick Newman about his new book, Cronyism: Rise of the Corporatist State, 1849–1929, which reviews how big business built the regulatory state, the Fed, and cartels like the AMA, all justified in the name of the "public interest."Related:Cronyism: Rise of the Corporatist State, 1849–1929: Mises.org/HAP562aBob on the Speaker Panel, Why Is the Healthcare System Broken?: Mises.org/HAP562b

On this episode of Power and Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho talk about the growing populist backlash to Flock cameras and the AI-powered security state. Are these simple private companies fulfilling a market for security, or a simple extension of federal surveillance?

After the death of Jason Arday, it is appropriate to examine the academic system in higher education and see why we should not expect it to change.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/jason-arday-and-dei-system-just-wont-die

The backlash against automated license plate readers is not really about traffic cameras. It is about a public that no longer assumes the people in charge are acting in good faith.Read the article here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/flock-camera-backlash-very-good-sign2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar through August 31. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/gabfreebookBe sure to follow the Guns and Butter podcast at https://Mises.org/GB

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has stated plans for five city-owned grocery stores to compete with private stores in NYC. However, as Henry Hazlitt and Frederic Bastiat before him have pointed out, the unseen costs in an initiative like this will outweigh the “seen” benefits.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/seen-and-unseen-cost-government-grocery-discount

There is no doubt that Chinese firms have made many advances in AI technology, but how far they can go in the future still is an open question.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/innovation-mirage-why-deepseek-and-kimi-3-do-not-settle-question-chinese-technological-supremacy

The rhetoric of independence allows the Treasury and the Fed to cooperate when convenient and deflect blame when something goes wrong.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/imaginary-world-fed-independence

Ryan McMaken shows how seizing control of money was central to building the modern state — a centuries-long project that culminated in World War I destroying the gold standard.Recorded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 15, 2026. Special thanks to George and Sally Gundrey for sponsoring this event.

Mark Thornton uses Austrian theory to explain where money came from — Menger's bottom-up origin of money — and why gold makes for sound money and smaller government.Recorded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 15, 2026. Special thanks to George and Sally Gundrey for sponsoring this event.

JP Cortez argues fiat money is a hidden theft, and that the fix is a bottom-up, state-level push to remove the taxes and rules that stop Americans from freely choosing gold and silver.Recorded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 15, 2026. Special thanks to George and Sally Gundrey for sponsoring this event.

Kevin Duffy reads gold's bull market through an Austrian investor's lens — America's "imperial bubble" and the gold demand driving it from a rising East.Recorded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 15, 2026. Special thanks to George and Sally Gundrey for sponsoring this event.

Mark Thornton, Ryan McMaken, Kevin Duffy, and JP Cortez close out the 2026 New Mexico Mises Circle by taking audience questions on gold, silver, Bitcoin, investing in China, the fate of the dollar, and the ballooning national debt.Recorded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 15, 2026. Special thanks to George and Sally Gundrey for sponsoring this event.

Mark Thornton revisits his Mises University lecture on government intervention and economic inequality, arguing that intervention does not merely shrink the economic pie: it changes who gets the biggest slices. Drawing on Rothbard's distinction between specific and general factors of production, Mark also shows how regulations, subsidies, tariffs, licensing, healthcare rules, and monetary policy reward protected firms, specialized capital, and politically favored workers while forcing everyone else into less productive, lower-paying alternatives.On Side B, Mark joins the David Lynn Show to discuss tariffs, the Fed, the business cycle, the Skyscraper Curse, AI data centers, war risks, diesel and fertilizer shortages, and why today's boom may be approaching its breaking point.2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar through August 31. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/issuesfree20% off listener offer on the insulated Minor Issues tumbler and three of Mark's books: https://mises.org/MinorIssuesTumbler. Use coupon code Thornton.Be sure to follow Minor Issues at https://Mises.org/MinorIssues

Democrats learned the hard way that voters don't like being told the economy is great when they're struggling to afford everyday life. Now Republicans have chosen the same strategy.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/return-economic-gaslighting