The Human Action Podcast

Tate Fegley, a Summer Fellow at the Mises Institute, combines his work in criminal justice at Boise State University with Hoppean and Rothbardian analyses of private law and private police.

Tate and Jeff discuss what crime and punishment might look like in a libertarian society, and how to convince skeptical libertarians that private police can do a better job of dealing with violence, theft, and fraud.

Private, competing defense agencies would operate with completely different incentives than state police: unlike government cops, private cops get fired when crime goes up. Private police have a direct financial interest in avoiding escalation of conflicts, avoiding legal liability for death or injuries, and avoiding damage to their agency's reputation. And under a Hoppean insurance model, both insurance companies and property owners have a direct incentive to prevent, rather than merely respond, to crime.

Finally, they discuss how direct restitution, rather than lengthy taxpayer-funded incarceration, would be a more economically efficient and more humane approach to helping crime victims.

If you're interested law and justice under anarcho-capitalism, stay tuned for a great interview.

Jeff Deist and Patrick Barron discuss European integration, which pits creditor nations like Germany against hapless debtors like Greece under the yoke of the Eurozone. With the Euro operating as a political project rather than a real currency, spendthrifts like Greece chronically find themselves unable to service debt. Greece, says Patrick, represents an example of Say's Law in action and a clear refutation of Keynes's belief that creating artificial demand via cheap credit stimulates production.

Think Greece can't happen here? Look no further than California, with its public pension crisis and huge debts.

If you're looking for a sober and hard-hitting analysis of what's really at issue in Greece, stay tuned for a great discussion with Patrick Barron.

Łukasz Dominiak's research as a Summer Fellow at the Mises Institute involves the cultural aspects of a libertarian legal system, with an emphasis on the works of Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Łukasz and I discuss what a private law society might look like in Europe, starting with Hoppe's example of "10,000 Liechtensteins." We discuss how private law develops from tradition and custom, rather than top-heavy state edicts. And because states destroy culture—in fact states view culture, custom, and tradition as enemies—reducing state power will cause cultural institutions to reassert themselves. Łukasz concludes that a truly libertarian society would be far less libertine than most western nations today, because high-risk individuals would bear more of the direct costs stemming from their lifestyle decisions.

We discuss the tension between liberty and free immigration in supposedly democratic states, where arbitrary national borders rather than private property boundaries cloud the issue. And we discuss the Hoppean conception of private defense, where protection against invaders would be largely a function of collective agreements and insurance arrangements.

If you're interested in Hoppe, private law, and the role of culture in libertarian theory, stay tuned for a great interview.

Demelza Hays, a Summer Fellow at the Institute and a graduate student of the Toulouse School of Economics in France, represents the new breed of young libertarians. Having grown up reading Rothbard, she's already firmly in the anarcho-capitalist camp. And unlike her parent's generation, she recognizes that America is far from the freest place on earth. Since her teenage years Demelza has developed an ex-pat mentality, living abroad both in India and France.

Demelza, like many anti-state Millennials, is serious about engaging in personal secession from the American leviathan. Now she's preparing to become a resident of Liechtenstein and obtain a PhD in economics. Her academic interests, particularly in the area of blockchain technology and decentralized currencies, fit with her personal views and personal life.

If you're a young person (or not so young person) interested in expatriating, and you want to know the job skills and mentality required, stay tuned for a fascinating interview.

Our guest this week is Louis Rouanet, a Summer Fellow at the Mises Institute and a formidable young Austro-libertarian scholar. Louis studies economics at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, and has published several articles at mises.org relating to his research work at the Institute.

Jeff and Louis discuss the deep French libertarian tradition, which goes far beyond Bastiat and Jean-Baptiste Say. In fact, French economics was once a close cousin of the Austrian school. And while we tend to see France as hopelessly statist and egalitarian today, its intellectual traditions are radically liberal.

Is France lost forever to the EU political project, and the likes of Hollande and Piketty? Or can she reclaim both her sovereignty and her liberty in the 21st century?

Governments, at least modern western governments, have always hated cash transactions. Cash is private, and cash is hard to tax. So politicians trump up phony reasons like drug trafficking and money laundering to win support for bad laws like the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which makes even small cash transactions potentially reportable to the Feds.

Today cash is under attack like never before. Ultra low interest rates are the norm for commercial bank accounts. In Europe, as the ECB ventures into negative nominal interest rates, certain banks threaten to charge customers for depositing cash. Meanwhile, certain European bonds now pay negative yields, effectively turning them into insurance products rather than financial assets. And some economists now call for the outright abolition of cash, which shows just how far some will go in their crazed belief that economic prosperity can be commanded by forcing us to spend rather than save.

The War on Cash is real, and it will intensify. Here to explain is Dr. Joe Salerno, who spoke on the subject at our recent Mises Circle event in Stamford, Connecticut.

James Grant, of 'Grant's Interest Rate Observer', recently joined us at our event in Stamford, Connecticut to discuss his new book 'The Forgotten Depression'.

If you've never heard of the Depression of 1921, it's because the federal government and the (then new) Federal Reserve did the opposite of what they did in 2008: federal spending was cut, the federal budget was balanced, and interest rates were allowed to rise. In other words, real austerity measures were implemented. The result? A short economic contraction that healed itself.

If you want to understand why TARP stimulus, too big to fail bank bailouts, and quantitative easing make our current economic crisis worse, there's nobody better than Jim Grant to explain.

Our guest this week is uniquely qualified to discuss modern progressives from a libertarian perspective. Jim Ostrowski, whom Murray Rothbard called "one of the finest people in the libertarian movement," is a lawyer, writer, activist, and chronicler of progressive dysfunction in his native New York. He's the author of 'Progressivism: A Primer on the Idea Destroying America', which explains progressivism more as personal psychology than a coherent view of the world. If you're interested in how progressives managed to capture the 20th century, stay tuned.

Modern progressives believe the state should control, or at least involve itself, in nearly every aspect of human activity. They believe countless things about government and human nature that are manifestly not true. Deeply hostile to liberty, they never accept responsibility for the disasters caused by the political, economic, legal, cultural, and social policies they advocate.

But should libertarians engage with progressives? Should we attempt to match their long march through the West's great institutions? Or should we write them off as hopelessly statist products of the dominant culture?

David Stockman is our guest this week in the second of a two-part interview. Stockman was a congressman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and a private equity fund manager who saw the devastation brought to American companies by an economy built on cheap debt instead of real productivity. His book 'The Great Deformation' is a tour de force exposé of crony capitalism, an indictment of Treasury Department and Federal Reserve bailouts following the crash of 2008, and one of the most important books on crony capitalism ever written. His Contra Corner website (davidstockmanscontracorner.com) is a daily must-read for anyone interested in the truth about our rigged economy.

David Stockman is our guest this week in the first of a two-part interview. Stockman was a congressman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and a private equity fund manager who saw the devastation brought to American companies by an economy built on cheap debt instead of real productivity. His book 'The Great Deformation' is a tour de force exposé of crony capitalism, an indictment of Treasury Department and Federal Reserve bailouts following the crash of 2008, and one of the most important books on crony capitalism ever written. His Contra Corner website (http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com) is a daily must-read for anyone interested in the truth about our rigged economy.