Mises Media

Mark Thornton opens this triple-header episode with a live Radio Rothbard appearance from Mises University, joining Ryan McMaken to discuss inflation, the K-shaped economy, asset prices, debt, the dollar, and why Austrian theory explains what mainstream accounts leave out. Thornton argues that monetary inflation benefits asset owners and government-connected interests first, while working households face higher prices long before wages catch up.

On Side B, Mark joins Freedom Works interview on democratic socialism, where he explains why young Americans are drawn to socialism, how government intervention created many of their grievances, and why free markets remain the real path forward. The episode closes with Wall Street Bullion to discuss gold, silver, energy, debt service, the weakening dollar, BRICS, the petrodollar, and the economic fallout from war in the Persian Gulf.

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/issuesfree

20% off listener offer on the insulated Minor Issues tumbler and three of Mark's books: https://mises.org/MinorIssuesTumbler. Use coupon code Thornton.

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Reviewing Lawrence H. White's Free Banking in Britain, Murray Rothbard dismantles the claim that Scotland enjoyed a century of successful free banking before the Peel Act of 1845. Drawing on Sydney Checkland's history, he shows that the Scottish banks pyramided credit on the Bank of England rather than standing on their own specie, suspended payment alongside England from 1797 to 1821, and let reserves fall from 10–20 percent to as little as 1 percent, while depositors who asked for gold met argument, rebuff, and the threat of losing future credit. The rarity of bank failure that White counts as proof of success, Rothbard argues, is evidence of the opposite.

Murray Rothbard realized the present system of punishment for committing crimes is both inadequate and unjust. We need to move to a system of restitution.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/i-spent-28-years-arresting-criminals-rothbard-was-right-all-along

Bob reviews Murray Rothbard's 1988 essay "The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland," his sharp response to Larry White's influential account of Scottish free banking.

Related:

• Rothbard's Article, "The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland": Mises.org/HAP560a
• Bob's Debate with George Selgin on Fractional Reserve Banking: Mises.org/HAP560b
• George Selgin's Article, "Scottish Banks and the Bank Restriction, 1797–1821": Mises.org/HAP560c
• Joe Salerno's Article on Mises as Currency School Free Banker: Mises.org/HAP560d
• Lawrence White, Free Banking in Britain Mises.org/HAP560e

No matter how legitimate the reasons might seem for going to war, the results are always horrific, and wars rarely, if ever, accomplish their stated purposes.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/dupes-war

The completion of the first draft of Man, Economy, and State enabled Murray Rothbard to move on to other activities and projects. He earned his doctorate in 1956 and reviewed papers and books for the Volker Fund, evaluating contemporary research using the body of economic theorems he had deduced. Focusing on the Chicago School, Rothbard criticized Israel Kirzner’s attempt to fuse Austrian insights with neo-Marshallian production theory as well as Milton Friedman and others’ neo-Fisherian monetary economics. Rothbard not only criticized new publications; he also continued to edit his treatise, adding new references and making other changes. In 1962, despite professional and institutional obstacles, Man, Economy, and State was finally published. With it, Rothbard greatly advanced the Austrian tradition and firmly positioned himself as Mises’s heir.

Murray Rothbard used his general-equilibrium approach with its emphasis on economic interrelations to erect a systematic framework of interventionism. He started by elaborating further on the concept of the purely free market and developing a comprehensive welfare theory. He then proceeded to create a typology of government policy, formulate a novel theory of monopoly that distinguishes between a monopoly price and a free-market price, develop an original theory of backward tax imputation, and analyze the calculational chaos caused by government expenditure. The capstone of Rothbard’s analysis of interventionism was his integration of the Mises–Hayek theory of the business cycle into general economic theory. Rothbard was thus able to demonstrate how the boom could result only from credit expansion and not from an increase in the supply of commodity money such as gold. He also demonstrated how credit contraction during the bust promotes recovery. With these advances in the Austrian theory of the business cycle, Rothbard finally completed the monumental task of deducing the entire corpus of economic theory using the praxeological method.

Murray Rothbard’s project drastically changed in mid-1953. Unable to rely on Mises’s sparse treatment of production theory, Rothbard adopted his old Marshallian approach, focusing on an individual firm that faced fixed prices and restricted investment decisions. But he soon recognized the pitfalls of Marshallian partial equilibrium and discarded it for Austrian general equilibrium, emphasizing the Böhm-Bawerkian capitalist-entrepreneur’s ability to invest in multiple firms across the structure of production and influence market prices. In doing so, Rothbard finished the Böhm-Baverkian system by integrating the pure time preference theory of interest of Frank A. Fetter and Ludwig von Mises into the production structure analysis of Knut Wicksell and F. A. Hayek. This interrelatedness approach led Rothbard to differentiate between factor incomes, apply Mises’s theory of the impossibility of socialist economic calculation to a vertically integrated firm, and expose the flaws of neoclassical monopoly and competition theory. With these theoretical breakthroughs, by 1955 Rothbard moved beyond his initial goal of “bringing to the surface and clarifying” his mentor’s “edifice” to deducing the architectonic edifice of praxeological economic theory along the lines of Mises’s “great book” suggestion.

Murray Rothbard’s economic perspective changed significantly in 1949 when he met Ludwig von Mises and read his magnum opus, Human Action. With the financial support of the Volker Fund, Rothbard accepted Mises’s offer to write a textbook rendition of his treatise. Early on, Rothbard evinced a thorough understanding of Mises’s monetary transmission mechanism and praxeological method. This allowed him to further develop the theories of value and price formation the emerging neoclassical synthesis had neglected. In particular, Rothbard used the means-ends relationship to deduce the law of ordinal marginal utility rankings and contrasted it with modern theories of utility. He then showed how this law logically resulted in demand schedules that always sloped downward, which in turn led to a theory of pricing that explained the process of equilibration to the market clearing price. Finally, he extended his analysis to price formation in a monetary economy. In addition to exhibiting his own intellectual progress, Rothbard’s developments significantly advanced economic science because Mises assumed these logical deductions but never actually derived them.

Murray Rothbard started his career with a foundational training in neoclassical economics. At Columbia University, he learned from highly regarded professors and demonstrated a thorough understanding of the positivist method, Keynesian and Marshallian economic theory, and institutional empirical analysis. Crucially, Rothbard perceived the fact that critical errors existed in these disparate strands of knowledge, although he could not yet articulate them. But the recognition itself motivated him to take the highly important step of contacting the free-market Foundation for Economic Education and the William Volker Fund, thereby discovering Austrian economics.