Bob Murphy Show

Robby Soave, a writer at Reason, was the first journalist to shatter the original narrative about the Covington Catholic students caught in the infamous faceoff with Native American Nathan Phillips. But Soave has also tried to correct the unfair coverage of Ilhan Omar.

In a fitting act of reciprocity, Tom Woods has Bob on his show for episode 1307 (which originally ran in December 2018), much like Bob had Tom on his show for episode 1. Bob explains how he got into Austrian economics and libertarianism.

Hannah Cox is National Manager of the organization Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. She is conservative/libertarian on standard policy issues, and is a strong advocate of the 2nd Amendment, but even so--perhaps surprisingly to some--she is also very alarmed with the State's abuses in the criminal justice system.

Bob analyzes John Carpenter's 1988 cult classic, "They Live," starring Roddy Piper. After making some general observations about the major thematic elements, Bob critiques the main character's strategy for dealing with an alien takeover of the media and government.

Economist Patrick Newman relays his adventurous tale of deciphering Murray Rothbard's handwritten manuscript on early American history. Needless to say, Rothbard's take is not what you learned in school.

Bob goes solo to explain some of the most important points in his new QJAE article on the fractional reserve banking debate. Bob shows why Mises thought *any* issuance of fiduciary media caused the boom-bust cycle, and he points out a major flaw in George Selgin's defense of fractional reserve banking.

Ben Powell, head of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech, discusses his newly released book Socialism Sucks (co-authored with Robert Lawson). Powell and Lawson toured countries around the world to observe firsthand life under ACTUAL socialism--in places like North Korea and Venezuela--versus places that merely have large welfare states (like Sweden). They concluded that, well, socialism sucks.

On July 19, 2019, Bob gave a talk on private military defense at Mises University. It was an elaboration of his standard talk from previous years on "The Market for Security."

This episode continues the discussion that Bob had with Dr. Michel Accad back in ep. 43. There, Bob reviewed the development of concepts like "efficiency" and "market failure," so that now he and Michel (in the current episode) could understand the pioneering 1963 article from Kenneth Arrow on health care economics. Specifically, Arrow outlines reasons that (in his mind) a free market in health care and health insurance won't work very well.

Steve Patterson--host of "Patterson in Pursuit"--talks to Bob about one of his recent essays, in which Patterson challenged the standard Misesian/Rothbardian view on economics. Specifically, Patterson claims that you can't get very far with pure a priori reasoning--even pretty basic economic laws rely on empirical assumptions.