The Human Action Podcast

Mises.org editor Ryan McMaken joins Jeff Deist for an entertaining look at the California ballot measure that would split the Golden State into three distinct parts. It's long overdue, says Ryan, and not as far-fetched as it sounds.

Danielle Booth, a veteran of the Dallas Fed and author of 'Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad for America' (Mises.org/FedUp), joins the show to consider whether—or if—the Fed can ever return to "normal" monetary policy. Raising interest rates might slow or even crash equity markets, while causing US debt service to spike. But leaving rates low keeps the US economy in zombie status, punishing savers and preventing bad debt and malinvestment from clearing. It's a no-win situation for new Fed Chair Jay Powell.

The Left makes excuses for Venezuela, college students wear Che Guevara shirts, and polls show growing support for socialism among millennials. Our friend Yuri Maltsev, a Soviet expat with no illusions about the real nature of state planning, joins the show to explain why (deluded and rich) western progressives, academics, elites, and media won't let go of their socialist project.

Jeff Deist joins his friend John O'Donnell on Power Trading Radio to talk about everything from money to Marx to whether "unilateral" free trade is a good idea.

This week, Mises Weekends features a 1988 lecture from Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe on Marxist and Austrian class analysis. It might surprise some that Dr. Hoppe sees some "intellectual affinities" between the two, in the way that each identifies exploitation among a ruling class. Of course, for Austrians, we identify that it is the state - not the bourgeois - who is the threat to the masses. Tune in for a fascinating talk.

Sandwiched between progressive avatars Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, Calvin Coolidge gets little acclaim. But Coolidge historian and biographer Amity Shlaes (AmityShlaes.com) makes the case for libertarians to view "Silent Cal" favorably, as someone who deeply and instinctively distrusted grandiose government. With the Great War over, Coolidge called for "normalcy" — meaning peace — staying out of the League of Nations, and a humble America First foreign policy (Mises.org/SilentCal). The Fed was in its infancy, but Coolidge instructed Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon to pursue a monetary policy that yielded deflation, arguing that "inflation is repudiation." And when he left office in 1929 the US federal budget was nominally smaller than when he first became president, a great feat in any era.

See also Mises.org/ShlaesBook (The Forgotten Man) and Mises.org/TFM (The Forgotten Man Graphic Novel).

Our guest is Dr. Per Bylund of Oklahoma State University, who joins Jeff Deist to dispel some of the myths surrounding artificial intelligence and mass data collection. AI is just the next evolution of smart software, Bylund argues, and should be celebrated like all technology as higher order capital goods that increase productivity and wealth. He also argues that Hayek's knowledge problem won't be overcome by computing power anytime soon, because no amount of data can fully explain subjective human wants and values. What makes AI and data mining potentially dangerous, Bylund reminds us, is their misuse by government.

See Per Bylund's article "What Makes AI Dangerous? The State" here: https://mises.org/power-market/what-makes-ai-dangerous-state

A week ago Trump tweeted about leaving Syria. Now the US and other western nations stand at the brink of a new war in Syria, one that threatens much greater conflict with Russia. Daniel McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute joins Jeff Deist to discuss whether John Bolton is now running US foreign policy, what Bibi Netanyahu told Trump on the phone, and whether cooler heads in the administration are thinking about second and third order effects. Have we learned anything at all from Libya and Iraq? And, how do interventionists maintain wars with no popular support beyond the Beltway?

The editorial "Against War in Syria" is available at Mises.org/Syria

At last month's Austrian Economics Research Conference, we were honored to be joined by Kevin Dowd, an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Nottingham University. Dowd presented a blistering critique of modern central bankers and their mania for monetary stimulus. In this excerpt from his talk, he explains how policies like negative interest rates not only reflect bad economic thinking, but also pose a danger to the civil liberties. What will the Fed and European Central Bank do next, if ersatz economic growth cools in a period of rising interest rates? Don't miss this masterful explanation of how central banks destabilize and distort every aspect of the economy.

Our guest Michael Watson joins Jeff Deist after delivering a provocative paper last week at our research conference comparing Mises and Thomas Aquinas. They discuss Misesian praxeology, Catholicism, charity, altruism, and personal relationships in an attempt to decide what acts lie within and without the scope of economics.

Are humans really super-rational Homo Economicus beings, per John Stuart Mills? No, according to Mises, who posits that we operate under conditions of bounded rationality using means-ends approaches. How do we reconcile our ethical worldviews with value-free economics? And how can we apply economics and praxeology to things like religious faith, love, and even involuntary conditions like slavery and war?