Mises Media

Modern Monetary Theory's central claim is that a government with a printing press is never budget constrained — so the only real limit on spending is inflation, not debt. Jonathan Newman takes MMT on in its own words, working through clips of MMT proponents making their case before responding. He shows why "their deficit is your surplus" collapses once you ask how debt service is financed, why the WWII economy MMT holds up as a model was a depression for private citizens once government spending is stripped from GDP, and—drawing on his chapter in a forthcoming Mises Institute book—why the archaeological record of ancient Mesopotamia flatly contradicts MMT's account of where money came from.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 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.

Game theory has Austrian roots—Oskar Morgenstern was Mises's doctoral student—but the way it's taught leads almost everywhere to the same conclusion: individuals left alone reach bad outcomes, so the state must intervene. Lucas Engelhardt argues the reasoning has a hole in it. Standard analysis treats the game as fixed, when real people are entrepreneurial: alert to opportunity, able to see a bad equilibrium coming and restructure the payoffs before it arrives. Working through the tragedy of the commons, public goods, tariffs, and Huerta de Soto's account of why bankers lobbied for a central bank, he offers a better question—not what should government impose, but how will entrepreneurs change the game, and if they haven't, what's stopping them?

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 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.

Paul Cwik and Shawn Ritenour trace what happened to the Austrian school after Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser—as it spread beyond Vienna and produced a generation of thinkers most students never encounter. Philip Wicksteed, the Unitarian minister who dispensed with the supply curve; William Smart, who gave English readers Böhm-Bawerk; Herbert Davenport and Frank Fetter, the core of the American school; and Richard von Strigl, the last Austrian in Vienna. Then the harder question: why that flourishing stalled, and what it took to revive it.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 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.

While the democratic socialists are claiming to just want a society like they have in Denmark, their real aims are the seizure of all or most private property and especially private capital.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/yes-democratic-socialists-want-soviet-style-control-capital

Drawing on his new book Cronyism: Rise of the Corporate Estate, 1849–1929, Patrick Newman makes the case that the Federal Reserve is the signature example of policy that serves a special interest at the public's expense. He first dismantles the standard justification — modern research finds the pre-Fed panics were less severe than advertised, and the real problems traced to regulations like the branch-banking ban. He then follows the money: Wall Street's declining market share, its campaign for a New York–controlled central bank, the Jekyll Island meeting, and what followed — a rising share of bank reserves, the dollar's ascent over the pound, and a credit expansion that ended in 1929.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 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.

Jeffrey Degner brings monetary economics to a subject economists rarely touch: the family. Surveying the global retreat from marriage and childbearing, he notes that the standard explanations — job instability, financialization, rising inequality, weakened contracts — all point back to inflationary monetary policy. Drawing on his book Inflation and the Family, he traces how persistent money growth builds an "inflation culture" of debt, short-termism, and Cantillon-effect inequality, then extends the analysis to fiscal and regulatory intervention. His conclusion: all intervention is family intervention, and civil society cannot be restored by the state that eroded it.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 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.

Tate Fegley surveys the big ideas of public choice—politics analyzed with the tools of economics—and shows where an Austrian approach sharpens them. Rational ignorance, concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, rent-seeking, the transitional gains trap, budget-maximizing bureaucracies, and the logic of collective action each get a turn, illustrated with sugar tariffs, million-dollar taxi medallions, and Sowell's Benedict Arnold thought experiment. Fegley's throughline: public choice is strongest when it drops the neoclassical assumptions of perfect knowledge and static equilibrium and grounds itself in Austrian subjectivism.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 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 makes a society prosper? Shawn Ritenour lays out the Austrian theory of economic progress, and its quarrel with mainstream growth theory. There is no single cause of prosperity, he argues—four "vehicles" drive it: the division of labor, capital accumulation, technological advance, and entrepreneurship. Conventional models can analyze each in isolation but miss the harder task of synthesis: how they must work together. And they leave out the one factor that coordinates the rest—the entrepreneur, the driving force who directs capital, labor, and technology toward what people actually want.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 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.

Drawing on his forthcoming book on environmental economics from an Austrian perspective, Timothy Terrell takes apart the standard case for environmental intervention. Following Roy Cordato and Rothbard, he argues the "best use" of a natural resource is not something a planner can determine—it's discovered through profit and loss—which leaves us unable to judge whether any given policy moves us toward or away from what people actually value. He then examines the two main attempts to price the environment without markets, contingent valuation and hedonics, and shows why both founder on subjective value and interpersonal utility comparisons. He closes with the history of federal land conservation, where Gifford Pinchot's Bureau of Forestry, the timber companies, and the land-grant railroads all found the same policy convenient.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 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.

Wanjiru Njoya applies praxeology to debates about race and discrimination. She starts with Mises on polylogism—the doctrine, shared by Marxists and Nazis alike, that logic itself varies by class or race—and his insistence that reason is common to all human beings. From there she turns to causation: drawing on Nozick, Walter Williams, and Thomas Sowell, she argues that research claiming discrimination causes economic inequality establishes correlation at best, and that unequal outcomes call for no special explanation in the first place.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 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.