Mises Media

Mark Thornton dissects “contagion” hype and argues it’s not a market pathology. He shows why, in a free market, failures reallocate customers, labor, and capital to better firms rather than spread panic. Contagion appears only when government links balance sheets and distorts prices. Mark traces how credit booms set up busts, and why even the Fed now sits upside-down, while homeowners are “rate-locked” and supply is frozen. The takeaway: politicians and central bankers invoke "contagion" to demand more power and money, while their interventions cause the very fragility they decry.

See also "Fight Inflation Now" (Minor Issues, ep...

For 150 years, Thanksgiving has been primarily an apolitical holiday that's really about family fun and eating a huge meal.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/thanksgiving-celebration-domestic-life

Bob walks through a recent WIRED video on “the economics behind the Great Depression,” correcting its claims on lax regulation, Hoover’s alleged inaction, the role of the Fed and the gold standard, and the notion that World War II ended the slump.

The Mises Institute is giving away 100,000 copies of Hayek for the 21st Century. Get your free copy at Mises...

The first English settlers in America learned a hard lesson about socialist economics in the early years of their new colonies as they faced starvation. Once they embraced free enterprise, however, they had something to be thankful for.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/thanksgiving-celebration-free-enterprise

50-year mortgages are likely to increase the likelihood of more "owners" becoming underwater and walking away from their mortgages. This will lead to more bailouts for the financial sector. Taxpayers will pay the price. 

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at https://Mises.org/RadioRothbard

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From the perspective of the state, the ideal society is one composed of single parents raising a small number of children in irreligious households.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/families-are-key-building-alternatives-state

In the wilderness of the New World, the Plymouth Pilgrims had progressed from the false dream of communism to the sound realism of capitalism.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/thanksgiving-celebrating-birth-american-free-enterprise

As the economy worsens, expect to see more articles from legacy media about how saving money is actually bad for the economy. It's an old Keynesian myth.

Be sure to follow the Loot and Lobby podcast at Mises.org/LL

Dr. Robert Murphy explains why America’s chronic trade deficits trace to Nixon’s 1971 gold exit—not China—and how a popular reading of Triffin’s “dilemma” confuses the issue.

Sponsored by Dan Johnson and Randee Laskewitz.

Recorded at the Mises Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida, on October 17, 2025.

Dr. Wanjiru Njoya explains how “phony civil rights” expand state power at the expense of self-ownership and property, and offers a conservative-libertarian case for liberty rooted in reality.

Sponsored by Don Wills.

Recorded at the Mises Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida, on October 18, 2025.

Dr. Jeffrey Herbener explains why “Crusoe economics” isn’t a caricature but the indispensable starting point for economics and liberty—built from action, property, and exchange.

Sponsored by Steven Berger.

Recorded at the Mises Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida, on October 18, 2025.

Bob revisits capital and interest theory to show why the textbook result “interest = MPK” only holds in a one-good world, and why in actual markets the interest rate emerges from time, prices, and capital valuation—not raw productivity.

The Mises Institute is giving away 100,000 copies of Hayek for the 21st Century. Get your free copy at Mises.org/HAPodFree

Mark Thornton traces seven headline “problems” back to one engine: monetary inflation. Drawing on Austrian insights, Mark explains how new money distorts prices and wages; why cheap credit spawns debt booms, asset bubbles, and zombie firms; how deficit finance and central banking turn war into a budget line; and why rising prices erode family formation, savings, and civic trust. He connects the dots to today’s policy mix and sketches a bottom-up remedy: hard budget constraints, sound money, and decentralization that restores real price signals. Mark makes the case that inflation isn’t just “too many dollars”: it’s the hidden sub...

Is minarchism an antidote for the growing statism and socialism infecting our body politic? Think of it as “statism lite.”

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/minarchism-worst-kind-state-idolatry

On this episode of Power & Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho discuss the latest jobs number data, what it means for the affordability crisis, the legacy of Dick Cheney, and Thanksgiving favorites."

Appearing on the John Curley Show, Ryan McMaken examines how policy—not culture-war slogans—undermines the American family. He points to marriage penalties in the tax and welfare code, inflation that erodes real wages, zoning and permitting that price families out of housing, and schooling/childcare mandates that shift authority from parents to bureaucracies. Rather than more top-down “family policy,” Ryan argues for decentralization: end the marriage penalties, curb monetary inflation, remove barriers to homebuilding and home-based work, and return decisions over education and child-rearing to parents and local communities. The result is a practical case for strengthening families by shrin...

The rent is too high. However, government interference into rental markets has been the main reason rents are so high in the first place.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/government-intervention-not-blackrock-blame-housing-crisis

Cheney was an architect of both Iraq wars, and he was a perennial supporter of the American surveillance state, torture, and more. 

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-i-wont-be-mourning-dick-cheney

Politicians in both parties are promising to address the affordability crisis. But neither is focusing on, or even discussing, the true causes. Here’s what they are and how to fix them.

Read the article here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-actually-solve-affordability-crisis

Be sure to follow the Guns and Butter podcast at https://Mises.org/GB

We must realize that the two most powerful motivations in human history have always been ideology and economic interest, and that a joining of these two motivations can be downright irresistible.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-daily/origins-welfare-state-america

Inflation is not just an economic phenomenon. It also undercuts the foundations of a civilization, leading to the breakdown of society itself.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/road-de-civilization-inflation-and-moral-erosion-society

Roger Williams, the Baptist minister whose libertarian views ran afoul of the Massachusetts Bay Colony authorities, should be honored as one of this country’s early libertarians.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/roger-williams-exemplar-americas-soul

Prompted by an online debate about whether economics belongs with the hard sciences, Bob reviews common defenses of mainstream practice and explains why they don’t settle the scientific status of the field. He outlines the Mises–Rothbard view: economics as praxeology (logic of action), closer to geometry than laboratory testing, with core insights on opportunity cost, incentives, prices, money, and policy constraints that don’t depend on forecasting the exact timing of crashes.

On this marathon episode of Minor Issues, Mark stitches together four recent interviews for a fast-moving tour of today’s economy: why gold spiked while precious metals whipsawed, how ballooning US debt and rising servicing costs tilt policy toward monetization, and what that means for inflation, markets, and families. Along the way Mark explains the Austrian lens behind his calls and why using it beats siloed, headline-driven takes.

Highlights include: the recent precious metals pullback and what to watch next; the mechanics of debt monetization; distributional effects that favor asset holders over wage earners; and why hyperinflation ri...

The revolutionaries include the pamphleteer writing in his study, the journalist, the agitator, the organizer, the campus activist, the theoretician, the philanthropist. 

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/meaning-revolution

The government “shutdown” and the so-called threat to the food stamp program may be abated for now, but we need to understand why this program has metastasized in recent years. James Bovard tells us why.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/food-stamps-and-federal-war-self-reliance

On this episode of Power & Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho talk about Trump's FDR-like proposal of a 50-year mortgage and the unfortunate reality that it seems to be one of the only actual policy ideas Republicans have left to "address" affordability.

November 11 was once known as Armistice Day, the day set aside to celebrate the end of WWI. In this essay Rothbard discusses the war as the triumph of several Progressive intellectual strains from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/rothbard-world-war-i-triumph-progressive-intellectuals

We libertarians may be anti-state, but that we are emphatically not anti-society or opposed to the real world, however contaminated it might be. 

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/resisting-evil

President Trump has proposed a 50-year mortgage for new homebuyers, ostensibly to make housing more affordable. Actually, this financial instrument will make housing more costly and do nothing to address the root of this entire problem: the artificial housing shortage.

Read the article here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/50-year-mortgages-wont-make-housing-more-affordable

Be sure to follow the Guns and Butter podcast at https://Mises.org/GB

Dr. Jonathan Newman explains why we don’t need a central bank, and lays out a concrete, Rothbard-inspired plan for actually ending the Fed.

Sponsored by Andy Hord.

Recorded at the Mises Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida, on October 17, 2025.

Dr. Jonathan Newman joins the Human Action Podcast to discuss his recent QJAE article disputing the claim that 'sticky prices' prevent markets from clearing--i.e., when the quantity supplied equals the quantity demanded. Dr. Newman applies Mises’s “plain state of rest” to show that each voluntary exchange equates quantities supplied and demanded, so observed “stickiness” doesn’t imply non-clearing markets.

The Mises Institute is giving away 100,000 copies of Hayek for the 21st Century. Get your free copy at Mises.org/HAPodFree

Is silver “manipulated,” or are fundamentals doing the work? Mark Thornton sifts the evidence and finds a simpler story. Big players have gamed markets before, but the long arc of silver prices reflects structural forces: the 1960s demonetization that pushed vast coin hoards into private stockpiles, decades of shifting industrial demand, and the rise of by-product mining. Add environmental compliance and hard-to-recycle “green” uses that sequester silver, and the result is stubbornly low real prices.

Be sure to follow Minor Issues at https://Mises.org/MinorIssues

In this lecture from the 2025 Mises Institute Supporters summit, Ryan looks at how the modern state is built on the rapid rise of taxation in recent centuries.  

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at https://Mises.org/RadioRothbard

Radio Rothbard mugs are available at the Mises Store. Get yours at https://Mises.org/RothMug PROMO CODE: RothPod for 20% off

The dystopian futuristic movie Elysium portrays a terrible future in which only the rich have medical care while the poor suffer on an overpopulated, polluted planet. The film’s theme—that only huge wealth transfers can bring medical care to low-income people—is fundamentally flawed.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/dystopia-misdiagnosed-how-rich-drive-health-innovation

If Hobbes is right about human nature, then he is wrong about the state as a solution. Ironically, his key arguments for the state are actually key reasons against it.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/hobbess-accidental-case-against-state

On this episode of Power & Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho take a look at this week's off-year elections. Were any of the outcomes a real surprise? Does Mamdami reflect the future of the left? Will affordability bring down MAGA? The roundtable discuss these questions and more.

While giddy socialists are proclaiming that Zohran Mamdani's electoral victory is the beginning of a socialist takeover of the U.S., the Democratic Socialists of America have a long way before they can complete their stated mission.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/election-mamdani-what-it-means-and-what-it-doesnt-mean

The justices that Trump appointed to the Supreme Court have shown a recent intolerance for the kinds of semantic leaps his administration is relying on to justify its tariffs. Will they remain consistent or fall in line behind the president?

Read the article here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/trumps-tariff-power-grab

Be sure to follow the Guns and Butter podcast at https://Mises.org/GB

Dr. Timothy Terrell explains how the federal government’s vast land holdings breed crowding, decay, and wildfire risk—and why returning land to private owners, guided by prices and responsibility, yields healthier parks and forests.

Sponsored by Brian and Shanna Tvenstrup.

Recorded at the Mises Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida, on October 17, 2025.