Austrian economics did not begin in 1871. Mark Thornton traces its lineage back through the thinkers the mainstream dismisses: the Spanish Scholastics, who worked out subjective value and the effects of inflation while dismantling the case against usury; the anti-mercantilists who told Louis XIV to abolish his taxes; the Physiocrats; and above all Richard Cantillon, whom Rothbard called the father of modern economics. Drawing on twenty-five years of his own research, Thornton makes the case for why the history of economic thought is not antiquarianism but a laboratory—and notes that the good ideas tend to appear precisely when the state grows tyrannical, overtaxes, and overspends.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.

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