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Plenty of people say they like Ron Paul on the economy but part ways with him on war. Connor O'Keeffe argues that's not a coherent place to stand. The warfare state—roughly $900 billion a year for the Pentagon alone, plus the intelligence agencies and veterans' programs—is only fundable because of the two things most libertarians most want gone: the income tax and the Federal Reserve. Strip those away and the empire collapses on the spot. And the causation runs the other way too: war is the health of the state, the coercive tools built for use abroad boomerang home, and the whole imperial project is quietly hollowing out the property rights and sound money that made the country wealthy enough to afford it. Pro-market and anti-war, he argues, is the only consistent position.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 25, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

In this episode of Radio Rothbard, recorded live at Mises University 2026, Ryan sits down with Mark Thornton to talk through the economic trends fueling today's unrest.

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On the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the French Revolution is being re-litigated again—the left holding it up as necessary progress, conservatives citing Burke to argue it proves free-market ideas end in blood. Ryan McMaken, drawing on Rothbard and Ralph Raico, rejects both. Liberalism's role, he argues, was small and confined to the revolution's first months; what followed owed nothing to Jefferson and everything to three forces—the extreme centralization of the French state, twenty-five years of war, and a revolutionary regime that simply replaced the old bureaucracy with a harsher one while keeping every lever of power intact. The real mirror of the American Revolution wasn't the revolution at all, but the decentralist, secessionist peasants of the Vendée it crushed.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 25, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Mark Thornton opens with an update on the “Stocks versus Manure” prediction contest, where agricultural stocks are beating the S&P 500 year to date. He then joins Maggie Lake on Wealthion to discuss gold, silver, mining stocks, Kevin Warsh, Fed policy, interest rates, the dollar, and why the long-term thesis for precious metals rests on debt, deficits, monetary inflation, and financial repression.

On Side B, Thornton appears on NTD to discuss the rising appeal of democratic socialism among younger Americans. He argues that young voters are reacting to real burdens—debt, unaffordable education, healthcare, housing, and Social Security promises—but are being drawn toward policies that cannot solve them. Mark also explains why socialism fails in theory and practice, from the calculation problem to incentives, and why education is essential to reversing the trend.

2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of The Origins of the Federal Reserve through July 31. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/issuesfree

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Patrick Newman presents the book he and Joseph Salerno have written, Murray N. Rothbard: The Making of an Austrian Economist. He traces Rothbard's path from a Columbia PhD steeped in the neoclassical synthesis, through his 1949 encounter with Mises and Human Action, to the writing of Man, Economy, and State—a project that began as a beginner's textbook and grew into the treatise that stands beside Human Action at the core of the Austrian tradition. Along the way: Rothbard's neglected theory of production, his reconstruction of welfare economics, and Mises's own remarkable assessment of his heir.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

The Policy and History faculty panel takes student questions on the state of the movement and the prospects for freedom. Along the way the panelists remember Dr. Roger Garrison, the Auburn economist who drew several of them into Austrian economics and who passed away this past year; work through the newest ideas in the field; debate whether utilitarian or moral arguments win more converts; trace which pre-Austrian thinkers shaped the American founders; and close on the question that matters most to a room full of students—where, realistically, does hope for a freer society come from?

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

The Theory and Method faculty panel  takes questions from Mises University students. They work through the tough theoretical ones (whether "supply-shock" inflation is really monetary, what Hayek got wrong about prices, how the mainstream's new "causal inference" differs from praxeological causation, whether transaction-cost economics fits an Austrian framework), then turn personal: the moment each of them discovered there was a way to do economics connected to the real world.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

What do Austrians think of equilibrium? Jonathan Newman's answer is "always and never." Rather than treating equilibrium as an unreachable ideal against which real markets are judged failures—the trap Mises warned against—he walks through a realistic market process asking at each step what has been settled and what remains open. That yields several distinct equilibrium constructs: the plane state of rest that occurs after every single exchange (where markets always clear), the Wicksellian state of rest where competitors' prices converge, and the final state of rest that the economy forever tends toward but never reaches. The payload is a quiet demolition of "sticky price" and "sticky wage" reasoning—and with it, the Keynesian account of depressions.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Mark Thornton turns Austrian analysis on economic inequality itself—not whether the pie is growing, but how government intervention re-slices it. Drawing on Rothbard's distinction between specific and general factors of production, he shows the mechanism: any protection, license, tariff, or subsidy enriches the insiders of the favored industry while forcing the displaced resources out into the unprotected economy, where they compete down everyone else's wages and returns. He works the logic through healthcare, and frames the whole thing around the rise of democratic socialism in America's cities—arguing the young are right to be angry about the debt, Social Security, and unaffordable healthcare their elders voted in, even as the socialist cure would deepen the disease.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.

Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

The anti-slavery disunionists and the abolitionists were some of the most critical of slavery and the most serious about ending it. For them, decentralization and secession were potential solutions not problems in ending slavery.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/anti-slavery-advocates-disunion