The Human Action Podcast

On this week’s episode, we feature a talk by Dr. Ron Paul at the Mises Circle in Houston. Dr. Paul gives a great speech on the ideas of liberty, and also includes a reference to how Bernie Sanders doesn’t seem to understand that the Plymouth colony experiment in America was actually a failure.

On this week's episode we feature a 2011 talk at the Mises Institute given by Hans-Hermann Hoppe on the subject of praxeology: the science of human action. It's a term and topic that can be intimidating to some people — and at nearly 50 minutes, Hoppe's talk is quite a bit longer than our usual weekend show — but it is vitally important to understand why praxeology is the proper economic methodology. Listeners will enjoy and benefit from Hoppe's razor-sharp discussion.

Our guest this weekend is Dr. Mark Thornton, a senior fellow here at the Mises Institute, and our topic is booms and busts. Falling stock prices are in the news lately, so Mark and Jeff talk about how and why central bankers don't understand deflation, whether they are really Keynesians or some variant thereof, what a "crack-up boom" might look like, and what the Skyscraper Index and other forms of irrational spending might tell us about the future of the global economy.

Our guest this weekend is Dr. Joe Salerno, academic vice president at the Mises Institute, and professor of economics at Auburn University. Jeff and Joe discuss monetary policy and gold on the heels of yet another GOP presidential primary debate.

It appears that not even Rand Paul is going to be able to generate much interest in the Fed or in monetary policy, generally, in the 2016 cycle. Ted Cruz has at least alluded faintly to the idea of a gold standard, for which he was promptly savaged by the media — both left and right — for even bringing it up.

As Joe and Jeff discuss, a gold standard is hardly something that needs to be imposed on anyone. It is something that can develop in the market place on its own, and it can develop alongside competing currencies. In other words, gold could be used as money in America alongside the US dollar.

They also talk about how the Fed's interest rate targeting — and really the entirety of its open market operations only serve to obscure what is really going on with the most important metric, which is the money supply. And, finally, Jeff and Joe consider how to sell to the general public (like Ron Paul did so successfully) some sort of anti-Fed populism.

You may have heard about the Swiss referendum to end fractional reserve lending by Swiss commercial banks. It's a fascinating development for Austrians and libertarians, and it's another example of how average Swiss people can use referenda to force both their central legislature and the twenty-six Swiss cantons to consider their proposals, merely by gathering 100,000 signatures within an 18-month period.

Here to help us understand this from a Swiss perspective is Claudio Grass, a good friend of the Mises Institute, a principal with the Swiss company Global Gold, and a Rothbardian with a great understanding of money and Banking issues.

Our show this weekend features Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Distinguished Scholar in Law and Jurisprudence at the Mises Institute and Senior Judicial Analyst at Fox News.

In this talk presented at the 2014 Mises Circle in Costa Mesa, California, Judge Napolitano lays out the difference between Natural Law and Legislative Law.

Our guest this week is Judge John Denson, the great war historian and lawyer who helped Lew Rockwell found the Mises Institute in the early 1980s.

In celebration of Christmas, Judge Denson and I discuss the infamous World War I truce that took place between British and German soldiers in December of 1914 — and how the 20th century may have been radically different, and radically less bloody, if that truce had brought about an early end to the war. We also discuss the critical importance of historical revisionism, and why a more peaceful future depends on all of us questioning official history and state propaganda.

Stay tuned for a great and hopeful interview.

This weekend, we feature a lecture by Dr. Robert Murphy that was recorded at our inaugural Mises Boot Camp this past summer, where Bob gave an introductory talk that sets the Austrian framework, and lays out how we should go about understanding economics. It's a great refresher for those who are familiar with the Austrian school, but it's also a great primer to share with your friends who are no so familiar.

In honor of the 24th anniversary of the Soviet Union's collapse, our guest this weekend is our old friend Dr. Yuri Maltsez, a senior fellow here at the Mises Institute and a professor of Economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Yuri is famous for having been a Soviet economist during the Gorbachev era and defecting to the United States.

Yuri and Jeff discuss Trump-ism, the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, and Western progressives' silly and enduring love affair with socialism. They also discuss what the often-misused terms 'socialism' and 'fascism' really mean.

Our returning guest this weekend is Łukasz Dominiak, a professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland, and also a former summer fellow at the Mises Institute.

Jeff and Łukasz discuss the recent elections in Poland, as well as the street protests that you might not have heard about in western media.

There is actually something very different happening in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, as compared to Western Europe. The media characterized its recent electrons as a triumph for the right-wing — dismissed as xenophobic nationalism in Poland and other European countries. But the truth as Łukasz explains is quite different: it's a strange mix of both left and right politics in a country that is not afraid to embrace its Catholic roots and its cultural identity.