Libertarian Links and Resources

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” So goes the well-traveled quote by economist Milton Friedman. This could be applied to certain laws enacted by governments over the years under the guise of keeping its […]

"South Dakota is not New York City."  A seemingly innocuous statement, made last Wednesday by Governor Kristi Noem in response to calls for her to issue a coronavirus shutdown across a state with the motto "Under God the […]

About 2.9 million people die in the United States each year from all causes. Monthly this total ranges from around 220,000 in the summertime to more than 280,000 in winter.  In recent decades, flu season has often peaked sometime from […]

In response to the coronavirus, central banks worldwide are currently pumping massive amounts of money. This pumping, it is held, is going to arrest the negative economic side effects that the virus-related panic inflicts on economies. As appealing […]

Modern central banks have already moved far beyond what was once considered the proper role for a central bank as a "lender of last resort." Now Keynesians and MMTers (modern monetary theorists) want to take things even further. As the COVID-19 […]

Bob Murphy urges skeptics not to dismiss the panic over the coronavirus as merely due to anti-Trump fear-mongering. Although government coercion is not justified, the underlying health crisis is very real. Bob also explains the economics of the […]

Not hesitating to exploit a health pandemic to advance their ideological agenda, Jacobin magazine on March 26 published an article attempting to proactively blame “millions” of coronavirus deaths on “capitalism.” Titled […]

The number of COVID-19 cases in Japan had been showing a very low daily uptick until this past week. Suddenly, there were more than forty new cases a day, and the news is reporting that for most of those people the route of infection cannot be […]

In a January 2020 Forbes Magazine article titled “Why Doing Good Is Good For Business” clearly left out critical information: who is the good or bad entrepreneur? According to the author, good entrepreneurs are doing good if their […]

Despite the more optimistic claims of political pundits and Federal Reserve officials (Jerome Powell, specifically), things are far from being under control. Notwithstanding archetypal Austrian objections to “loose” monetary and fiscal […]

With over $12 trillion in negative-yielding debt and the yield on the ten-year Treasury bond falling below 1 percent for the first time, the days in which people could reliably count on a steady stream of income from their assets seem to […]

One day over the next few weeks, I will find my bank account $4,400 higher than the day before. I’ll have more bread, so to speak. However, the circuses—the movies, concerts, sporting games, etc.—will remain nowhere to be found. […]

Dr. Joe Salerno joins the show for a dynamic look at Human Action Part Four, arguably the meatiest part of the book. Chapters 18, 19, and 20 are where Mises presents the idea of pure time preference, his expanded theory of interest, and the […]

Mainstream economists have turned Japan’s adverse demographics into a scapegoat for its economic debacle. Be it the Financial Times or the IMF, the general narrative is that Japan’s shrinking and rapidly aging population […]

It is clear that arbitrary minimum wage laws are not only ineffective, but actually detrimental to real wage growth. So what type of action results in increasing wages in the United States, or any country for that matter? The only way to raise real […]

The British philosopher Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was by no means a libertarian. So far as I know, his political views were conventionally leftist. But he destroys egalitarianism with his levelling down objection. If you say that equality of […]

The hilarious stand-up comic and Rothbardian Dave Smith invites Bob onto his show, Part of the Problem, to talk about the government’s response to the coronavirus. For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also […]

The Fed came out with a series of unprecedented measures on March 22, 2020. They announced the Fed will buy an unlimited amount of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities (MBS), or as Peter Schiff refers to it, “QE infinity.” This […]

Pete Quinones, host of the Free Man Beyond the Wall podcast invited Jeff Deist to return to the show to go over the government’s response to the coronavirus, and to see if there are any positives that can be found in this situation.

A counterfactual experiment helps us realize the enormity of the present situation. What Could Have Happened Suppose the COVID-19 pandemic had hit the globe under sound money, say a gold standard regime. In that counterfactual there would be no […]

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in late 2020.] In chapter 5 we reviewed the textbook analysis of how a central bank buys government debt in […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the lives of billions and has put many Americans and others around the globe in compromised financial situations. As the COVID-19 virus (also known as the coronavirus) has continued to spread, this has led to […]

In the midst of the emerging economic chaos triggered by the COVID-19 coronavirus, individuals are seeking answers from governments as to how to prevent the emerging economic disaster. Most economic experts are sympathetic to this and are urging the […]

As we watch in real-time how governments respond to the novel coronavirus pandemic, some of the most predictable forms of state overreach—from restrictions on the freedom of assembly to the suppression of regular commerce—have been […]

The Food and Drug Administration helped turn the coronavirus from a deadly peril into a national catastrophe. Long after foreign nations had been ravaged and many cases had been detected in America, the FDA continued blocking private testing. The […]

Our guest is Aaron Kheriaty, MD, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine, where he is Director of the Bioethics Program. Dr. Kheriaty is the chair of his hospital’s ethics committee and is presently […]

With election season well underway and political tensions heating up, everyone’s attention will be glued to the TV or their favorite political website for the next few months. Political ads will inundate TV and internet media as political […]

Quick, what do Amazon, Gilead, and Netflix have in common? Obvious answer: they are getting valuable, even lifesaving, goods to people stuck in their homes; working hard to develop treatments and cures for the new strain of coronavirus; and helping […]

From late 2014 to early 2017, I occupied a unique spot in the tenant/landlord dynamic: I was both. I started out as a homeowner, but for several reasons I recently spent a year in an apartment, plus two more years in a rental house. This […]

Representatives Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley just introduced the Student Debt Emergency Relief Act to provide student debt relief during the coronavirus pandemic. In reality, the crisis is a pretext to push through student loan forgiveness of as […]

The shutdown of the American economy by government decree should end. The lasting and far-reaching harms caused by this authoritarian precedent far outweigh those caused by the COVID-19 virus. The American people—individuals, families, […]

Three days before Barack Obama left office, his Department of Labor served a complaint against Oracle America, Inc., alleging gross systemic discrimination in both its hiring and pay practices. Specifically, it claims that Oracle discriminates […]

China’s rise as a global power has produced an immense number of books, articles, and analyses about what is behind the nation’s economic growth. But it isn’t a great mystery. The remarkable economic surge of China since the 1980s […]

Hunter Hastings asks Sean Ring, Finlingo Co-founder and CEO, for his number one secret for entrepreneurial success. His answer: Iteration. Sean offers additional insights, as we’ll see below, but the power of iteration is his number one: doing […]

How can the Fed launch an “unlimited” monetary stimulus with congress approving a $2 trillion package and the dollar index remain strong? The answer lies in the rising global dollar shortage, and should be a lesson for monetary […]

The Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy and industry bailouts threaten more than just the fragile economy. The very foundation of the social order risks permanent fracturing under this system of moral hazard. In Human Action, Ludwig […]

Oren Cass is the executive director of American Compass (AmericanCompass.org), a conservative think tank that stresses the importance of family and domestic industry, in opposition to a singleminded devotion to economic efficiency. Cass was […]

Austrians and Libertarians are well-established critics of central banking in general, and emergency monetary stimulus in particular. There is near universal agreement that Alan Greenspan should not have cut rates following the Dot-Com Bubble, and […]

We may currently be facing the biggest economic crisis of all time, because it is a multifaceted crisis: first, there is the pandemic with its disastrous direct consequences for tourism, the service sector, and trade. Secondly, there is an oil price […]

Abstract: This paper offers a synthetic and comparative assessment of the most basic Austrian macroeconomic models, i.e. the models that analyze the static forces determining the equilibrium interest rate and structure of production (monetary […]

Economists and Wall Street analysts are using the word recession to describe the looming plunge in output in the US economy. We’ll just make the point early that economists, exhibiting the typical emptiness of their failed science, can’t […]

With fear of the coronavirus continuing to wreak havoc on every country in the West, almost all governments have taken radical measures for containment of the virus: mandatory quarantines for many, the closing of businesses, and the […]

Our guest is intensive care specialist Mark Tonelli, Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. He shares with us the encounter with the COVID-19 pandemic as it emerged from a nursing home in King County, […]

Some commentators regard cost cutting by companies in order to secure profits as a major threat to the economy. They hold that if everyone tries to cut costs and save more, demand for goods and services from retrenched workers will fall, which in […]

Young people today are delaying starting “adult” life until later and later. The median age of first marriage has climbed to nearly 30, up from the mid-20s a generation ago. The median age of the first-time homebuyer hit a record 33 in […]

To limit the spread of COVID-19 in Canada, “The federal government has advised Canadians to stay at home and limit their contact with others if they have been diagnosed with the virus, exposed to someone who has or if they traveled outside […]

We dive into Part Four of Human Action with Professor Jeffrey Herbener, Chair of the Economics Department at Grove City College. This is a fantastic discussion of money and market exchange, with Mises proving timely as ever given the current […]

When one imagines working on Wall Street, he envisions stock traders scrambling to place buy or sell orders, perhaps even some puts or options. Today’s powerful artificial intelligence tools allow traders to game stock market trading. In some […]

Eminent domain gives the government the power to take over private property for public use. A popular argument that this interference with private property is needed goes like this: We can’t measure subjective utility, but we can take […]