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The completion of the first draft of Man, Economy, and State enabled Murray Rothbard to move on to other activities and projects. He earned his doctorate in 1956 and reviewed papers and books for the Volker Fund, evaluating contemporary research using the body of economic theorems he had deduced. Focusing on the Chicago School, Rothbard criticized Israel Kirzner’s attempt to fuse Austrian insights with neo-Marshallian production theory as well as Milton Friedman and others’ neo-Fisherian monetary economics. Rothbard not only criticized new publications; he also continued to edit his treatise, adding new references and making other changes. In 1962, despite professional and institutional obstacles, Man, Economy, and State was finally published. With it, Rothbard greatly advanced the Austrian tradition and firmly positioned himself as Mises’s heir.

Murray Rothbard used his general-equilibrium approach with its emphasis on economic interrelations to erect a systematic framework of interventionism. He started by elaborating further on the concept of the purely free market and developing a comprehensive welfare theory. He then proceeded to create a typology of government policy, formulate a novel theory of monopoly that distinguishes between a monopoly price and a free-market price, develop an original theory of backward tax imputation, and analyze the calculational chaos caused by government expenditure. The capstone of Rothbard’s analysis of interventionism was his integration of the Mises–Hayek theory of the business cycle into general economic theory. Rothbard was thus able to demonstrate how the boom could result only from credit expansion and not from an increase in the supply of commodity money such as gold. He also demonstrated how credit contraction during the bust promotes recovery. With these advances in the Austrian theory of the business cycle, Rothbard finally completed the monumental task of deducing the entire corpus of economic theory using the praxeological method.

Murray Rothbard started his career with a foundational training in neoclassical economics. At Columbia University, he learned from highly regarded professors and demonstrated a thorough understanding of the positivist method, Keynesian and Marshallian economic theory, and institutional empirical analysis. Crucially, Rothbard perceived the fact that critical errors existed in these disparate strands of knowledge, although he could not yet articulate them. But the recognition itself motivated him to take the highly important step of contacting the free-market Foundation for Economic Education and the William Volker Fund, thereby discovering Austrian economics.

Plenty of people say they like Ron Paul on the economy but part ways with him on war. Connor O'Keeffe argues that's not a coherent place to stand. The warfare state—roughly $900 billion a year for the Pentagon alone, plus the intelligence agencies and veterans' programs—is only fundable because of the two things most libertarians most want gone: the income tax and the Federal Reserve. Strip those away and the empire collapses on the spot. And the causation runs the other way too: war is the health of the state, the coercive tools built for use abroad boomerang home, and the whole imperial project is quietly hollowing out the property rights and sound money that made the country wealthy enough to afford it. Pro-market and anti-war, he argues, is the only consistent position.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 25, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

In this episode of Radio Rothbard, recorded live at Mises University 2026, Ryan sits down with Mark Thornton to talk through the economic trends fueling today's unrest.Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at https://Mises.org/RadioRothbardRadio Rothbard mugs are available at the Mises Store. Get yours at https://Mises.org/RothMug PROMO CODE: RothPod for 20% off

On the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the French Revolution is being re-litigated again—the left holding it up as necessary progress, conservatives citing Burke to argue it proves free-market ideas end in blood. Ryan McMaken, drawing on Rothbard and Ralph Raico, rejects both. Liberalism's role, he argues, was small and confined to the revolution's first months; what followed owed nothing to Jefferson and everything to three forces—the extreme centralization of the French state, twenty-five years of war, and a revolutionary regime that simply replaced the old bureaucracy with a harsher one while keeping every lever of power intact. The real mirror of the American Revolution wasn't the revolution at all, but the decentralist, secessionist peasants of the Vendée it crushed.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 25, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Patrick Newman presents the book he and Joseph Salerno have written, Murray N. Rothbard: The Making of an Austrian Economist. He traces Rothbard's path from a Columbia PhD steeped in the neoclassical synthesis, through his 1949 encounter with Mises and Human Action, to the writing of Man, Economy, and State—a project that began as a beginner's textbook and grew into the treatise that stands beside Human Action at the core of the Austrian tradition. Along the way: Rothbard's neglected theory of production, his reconstruction of welfare economics, and Mises's own remarkable assessment of his heir.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

The Policy and History faculty panel takes student questions on the state of the movement and the prospects for freedom. Along the way the panelists remember Dr. Roger Garrison, the Auburn economist who drew several of them into Austrian economics and who passed away this past year; work through the newest ideas in the field; debate whether utilitarian or moral arguments win more converts; trace which pre-Austrian thinkers shaped the American founders; and close on the question that matters most to a room full of students—where, realistically, does hope for a freer society come from?Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

The Theory and Method faculty panel  takes questions from Mises University students. They work through the tough theoretical ones (whether "supply-shock" inflation is really monetary, what Hayek got wrong about prices, how the mainstream's new "causal inference" differs from praxeological causation, whether transaction-cost economics fits an Austrian framework), then turn personal: the moment each of them discovered there was a way to do economics connected to the real world.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

What do Austrians think of equilibrium? Jonathan Newman's answer is "always and never." Rather than treating equilibrium as an unreachable ideal against which real markets are judged failures—the trap Mises warned against—he walks through a realistic market process asking at each step what has been settled and what remains open. That yields several distinct equilibrium constructs: the plane state of rest that occurs after every single exchange (where markets always clear), the Wicksellian state of rest where competitors' prices converge, and the final state of rest that the economy forever tends toward but never reaches. The payload is a quiet demolition of "sticky price" and "sticky wage" reasoning—and with it, the Keynesian account of depressions.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Mark Thornton turns Austrian analysis on economic inequality itself—not whether the pie is growing, but how government intervention re-slices it. Drawing on Rothbard's distinction between specific and general factors of production, he shows the mechanism: any protection, license, tariff, or subsidy enriches the insiders of the favored industry while forcing the displaced resources out into the unprotected economy, where they compete down everyone else's wages and returns. He works the logic through healthcare, and frames the whole thing around the rise of democratic socialism in America's cities—arguing the young are right to be angry about the debt, Social Security, and unaffordable healthcare their elders voted in, even as the socialist cure would deepen the disease.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

There is no separate "economics of AI," Peter Klein argues, any more than there was an economics of the internet—there's just economics, applied to specific goods and services. He demystifies what today's models actually do (predict the next word), places them in a long history of "new economy" hype that never required new economic theory, and works through the industry with standard tools: subjective value, the theory of the firm, network effects, and the incumbents' lobbying for regulation to raise rivals' costs. He closes on the deeper question—whether an AI can act in Mises's sense—and argues it cannot: an AI exercises what he calls derived judgment, executing tasks on an entrepreneur's behalf, but it can never decide whether to be an entrepreneur at all.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Everyone agrees higher education is in crisis—tuition rising ten times faster than the price level, administrative bloat, a looming demographic cliff, collapsing public confidence. Peter Klein argues these are symptoms, not the disease. Answering the claim that education is a special good beyond ordinary economic analysis, he shows that what markets actually deliver are discrete units of educational goods and services, and that standard Austrian analysis applies as readily here as to shoes. The structural problem is that there is no free market to speak of: state entities own most institutions, even elite privates draw nearly half their revenue from government, and a handful of federally licensed accreditors control entry. Following Rothbard, Klein's answer is the separation of education and state—with the Mises Institute itself as a working example.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

What can economics actually teach you about running a business? From the mainstream, Per Bylund argues, very little—its models have no room for the entrepreneur at all. Austrian economics is a different matter. Working from Menger forward, Bylund lays out the sequence every business faces: costs come first and certain, value comes last and unknown. From that he draws the practical implications—why cost-plus pricing is a recipe for failure, why no producer has "pricing power" even as a monopolist, why the firm is best understood as a temporary island of specialization, and why the entrepreneur's only real question is how best to serve the consumer.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Money is never neutral. Jeffrey Degner works line by line through the passage of Cantillon's Essay that made the case nearly three centuries ago—showing how new money enters the economy unevenly, enriching those who receive it first and squeezing everyone who receives it last. Cantillon named the losers precisely: those on fixed wages, and property owners locked into leases as their costs rise. Degner then brings the analysis forward, connecting it to the several distinct patterns now described as the "K-shaped economy"—divergence between sectors, between the consumption of high- and low-income households, and between a soaring stock market and consumer sentiment that has fallen below its COVID lows.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

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.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Modern Monetary Theory's central claim is that a government with a printing press is never budget constrained — so the only real limit on spending is inflation, not debt. Jonathan Newman takes MMT on in its own words, working through clips of MMT proponents making their case before responding. He shows why "their deficit is your surplus" collapses once you ask how debt service is financed, why the WWII economy MMT holds up as a model was a depression for private citizens once government spending is stripped from GDP, and—drawing on his chapter in a forthcoming Mises Institute book—why the archaeological record of ancient Mesopotamia flatly contradicts MMT's account of where money came from.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Game theory has Austrian roots—Oskar Morgenstern was Mises's doctoral student—but the way it's taught leads almost everywhere to the same conclusion: individuals left alone reach bad outcomes, so the state must intervene. Lucas Engelhardt argues the reasoning has a hole in it. Standard analysis treats the game as fixed, when real people are entrepreneurial: alert to opportunity, able to see a bad equilibrium coming and restructure the payoffs before it arrives. Working through the tragedy of the commons, public goods, tariffs, and Huerta de Soto's account of why bankers lobbied for a central bank, he offers a better question—not what should government impose, but how will entrepreneurs change the game, and if they haven't, what's stopping them?Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Paul Cwik and Shawn Ritenour trace what happened to the Austrian school after Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser—as it spread beyond Vienna and produced a generation of thinkers most students never encounter. Philip Wicksteed, the Unitarian minister who dispensed with the supply curve; William Smart, who gave English readers Böhm-Bawerk; Herbert Davenport and Frank Fetter, the core of the American school; and Richard von Strigl, the last Austrian in Vienna. Then the harder question: why that flourishing stalled, and what it took to revive it.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Drawing on his new book Cronyism: Rise of the Corporate Estate, 1849–1929, Patrick Newman makes the case that the Federal Reserve is the signature example of policy that serves a special interest at the public's expense. He first dismantles the standard justification — modern research finds the pre-Fed panics were less severe than advertised, and the real problems traced to regulations like the branch-banking ban. He then follows the money: Wall Street's declining market share, its campaign for a New York–controlled central bank, the Jekyll Island meeting, and what followed — a rising share of bank reserves, the dollar's ascent over the pound, and a credit expansion that ended in 1929.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Jeffrey Degner brings monetary economics to a subject economists rarely touch: the family. Surveying the global retreat from marriage and childbearing, he notes that the standard explanations — job instability, financialization, rising inequality, weakened contracts — all point back to inflationary monetary policy. Drawing on his book Inflation and the Family, he traces how persistent money growth builds an "inflation culture" of debt, short-termism, and Cantillon-effect inequality, then extends the analysis to fiscal and regulatory intervention. His conclusion: all intervention is family intervention, and civil society cannot be restored by the state that eroded it.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Tate Fegley surveys the big ideas of public choice—politics analyzed with the tools of economics—and shows where an Austrian approach sharpens them. Rational ignorance, concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, rent-seeking, the transitional gains trap, budget-maximizing bureaucracies, and the logic of collective action each get a turn, illustrated with sugar tariffs, million-dollar taxi medallions, and Sowell's Benedict Arnold thought experiment. Fegley's throughline: public choice is strongest when it drops the neoclassical assumptions of perfect knowledge and static equilibrium and grounds itself in Austrian subjectivism.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Drawing on his forthcoming book on environmental economics from an Austrian perspective, Timothy Terrell takes apart the standard case for environmental intervention. Following Roy Cordato and Rothbard, he argues the "best use" of a natural resource is not something a planner can determine—it's discovered through profit and loss—which leaves us unable to judge whether any given policy moves us toward or away from what people actually value. He then examines the two main attempts to price the environment without markets, contingent valuation and hedonics, and shows why both founder on subjective value and interpersonal utility comparisons. He closes with the history of federal land conservation, where Gifford Pinchot's Bureau of Forestry, the timber companies, and the land-grant railroads all found the same policy convenient.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

What makes a society prosper? Shawn Ritenour lays out the Austrian theory of economic progress, and its quarrel with mainstream growth theory. There is no single cause of prosperity, he argues—four "vehicles" drive it: the division of labor, capital accumulation, technological advance, and entrepreneurship. Conventional models can analyze each in isolation but miss the harder task of synthesis: how they must work together. And they leave out the one factor that coordinates the rest—the entrepreneur, the driving force who directs capital, labor, and technology toward what people actually want.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Wanjiru Njoya applies praxeology to debates about race and discrimination. She starts with Mises on polylogism—the doctrine, shared by Marxists and Nazis alike, that logic itself varies by class or race—and his insistence that reason is common to all human beings. From there she turns to causation: drawing on Nozick, Walter Williams, and Thomas Sowell, she argues that research claiming discrimination causes economic inequality establishes correlation at best, and that unequal outcomes call for no special explanation in the first place.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Alvin Roth won a Nobel Prize for designing workarounds to markets society finds morally repugnant. Sandy Klein argues the workarounds aren't needed. Taking Roth's objections in turn—that such markets are too thin, that participants won't reveal their preferences, that the offense others feel is a negative externality—she shows each dissolves under Austrian analysis: repugnance is simply a subjective preference, already priced into how people act, and not a market failure at all. She then applies the point to transplantable organs, where a 1984 ban on sales functions as a price ceiling of zero and the resulting shortage is counted in lives.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Will Gen Z ever be able to buy a house? Timothy Terrell starts by clearing away the popular explanations—institutional investors buy under two percent of homes, the median first-time buyer is still 33, and a 1950s house was half the size, often without indoor plumbing. Then he turns to the causes that hold up: Federal Reserve inflation inflating home prices while first-time buyers sit on cash, zoning rules that let existing owners vote down new supply, and Dodd-Frank regulations that killed off the small mortgages starter homes depend on.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 22, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Economists have agreed on free trade for two centuries; the public and the politicians haven't caught up. Lucas Engelhardt rebuilds the case from scratch—mutual benefit, comparative advantage, and the simple point that drawing a border between two traders destroys none of the gains—then takes apart the arguments for tariffs one by one. Most timely is his treatment of trade deficits: following Mises, he shows a deficit isn't a "loss" but the natural result of Americans choosing goods over cash, and explains why "Liberation Day" tariffs actually made the deficit spike.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

With New York reviving a citywide rent freeze, Joseph Salerno returns to the economics of price controls. Following Mises and Rothbard, he shows how a single cap—on milk, say—triggers shortages that pull in control after control until the state is planning everything. He tells the story of postwar Germany, starving under price controls until Ludwig Erhard abolished them in a stroke, and then traces the surprising long-run damage of rent control: not just housing shortages, but frozen mobility, decaying buildings, black markets, and even more discrimination.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Do free markets naturally tend toward monopoly, requiring antitrust to keep them honest? Tate Fegley makes the Austrian case that the whole framework is backwards. The neoclassical ideal of "perfect competition" defines away real competition—advertising, undercutting, innovating—and treats it as evidence of monopoly. Following Rothbard, Fegley argues the only coherent monopoly is one granted by the state, and works through the antitrust consequences, from Lina Khan's case against Amazon to the courts punishing Alcoa for serving customers too well.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Patrick Newman lays out the Austrian theory of the business cycle—one of the school's signature contributions. He first shows how genuine savings drives sustainable growth by lengthening the structure of production, then explains how central-bank credit expansion counterfeits that process: pushing interest rates below their natural level sends a false signal, luring entrepreneurs into long-term investments that real resources can't sustain. The result is a boom that must end in either a cleansing bust or runaway inflation—and, Dr. Newman argues, a modern policy of propping up the malinvestment that has defined the era since 2008.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Is capital a uniform "pool" that can be reshaped into anything, or a delicate, time-structured web of complementary pieces? Paul Cwik traces the question from Menger and Böhm-Bawerk through the great debates with J.B. Clark and Frank Knight, and shows why the answer matters enormously. Because capital is heterogeneous, a fall in consumption need not mean recession—it can mean the economy is lengthening its structure of production to build future growth, a shift the mainstream, assuming capital is homogeneous, simply cannot see.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Timothy Terrell revisits Mises's 1920 bombshell: under socialism, rational economic calculation isn't just hard—it's impossible. Without market prices for the means of production, a central planner is blind, unable to tell whether he's creating wealth or destroying it. Terrell traces the argument from Soviet railroads and steel-bodied fighter jets to a strikingly modern target: the U.S. government's central planning of the American West.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Jeffrey Herbener builds the Austrian theory of interest from the ground up. Interest, he argues, isn't the productivity of capital or a mere cost of borrowing—it's the "originary" premium that arises because human beings are temporal and prefer the same satisfaction sooner rather than later. From time preference he derives the pure rate of interest, shows why a single rate integrates the entire economy from credit cards to capital investment, and explains why productivity discounts back through the rate rather than setting it.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Why is a lecture on banking scheduled for the very first day of Mises University? Because, Jonathan Newman argues, banking is where money gets strange. Following Rothbard's Mystery of Banking, he separates the two things a bank can do—safekeeping your deposits and lending out savings—and shows that neither one expands the money supply. The trouble begins when a bank promises your deposit is available on demand while quietly lending most of it away.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 20, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Where does money come from? Sandy Klein walks through the Mengerian answer: not from a king's decree or a social contract, but spontaneously, as traders gravitated to the most saleable good until one commodity became universally accepted. Along the way she shows why barter can't sustain a real economy, why gold and silver kept winning out, and why—following Rothbard—there's no such thing as an "optimal" money supply.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 20, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Why teach entrepreneurship on the first day of Mises University? Because for the Austrians, Peter Klein argues, entrepreneurs aren't niche figures from the world of startups and venture capital—they're the driving force of the entire market. Following Mises, Klein defines entrepreneurship as the bearing of uncertainty: the act of combining land, labor, and capital in advance of an unknown payoff. It's not a personality trait or an industry, but a fundamental category of human action.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 19, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Is a market economy a war of all against all, or the very thing that makes peace possible? Shawn Ritenour makes the Misesian case for the latter. Building from specialization and the law of comparative advantage—why even a person outdone at everything still has a place—he shows how the division of labor turns our inequalities into the glue of society, and why the only way to profit in a market is to serve someone else first.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 20, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Jeffrey Herbener builds Austrian price theory from the ground up—starting with the single acting person weighing ends against means, and arriving at Mises's calculation argument. Value is purely subjective, he shows, so no producer can gauge whether he's serving consumers well by feeling alone. What makes economizing across a division of labor possible is money prices—and the profit-and-loss accounting they enable.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 20, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

David Gordon lays out praxeology—the science of human action—and the deductive method that sets Austrian economics apart. With characteristic wit, he distinguishes valid arguments from sound ones, weighs Rothbard's "it's just self-evident" grounding of the action axiom against Mises's a priori approach, and shows why economic truths deduced by pure logic can still be genuinely surprising.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 20, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

In the opening lecture of Mises University, Joseph Salerno returns to 1871, when Carl Menger's Principles of Economics launched the Austrian school. Salerno shows how Menger's law of marginal utility solved the ancient "paradox of value"—why life-giving water is cheap and useless diamonds dear—and, in doing so, moved economics away from the classical focus on the businessman and cost, and toward the acting, wanting human being.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 20, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Opening the 40th Mises University, Professor Hülsmann tells how the Austrian school came back from near-extinction—and why Mises U was central to its revival. Drawing on his own front-row experience, he traces the network of scholars who trained in Auburn and then carried Austrian economics across Europe, from Madrid to Prague to Vilnius.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 19, 2026. Sponsored by Olivier Pinson. Includes a welcome and introduction by Joseph T. Salerno.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.

Democratic socialists insist the horrors of the twentieth century were a betrayal of their ideal—that their version would be staffed by good people, to good ends. In this 1977 essay, Murray Rothbard argues the brutality is inherent in the system, not the personnel, which makes "humanistic" or "democratic" socialism a contradiction in terms.Originally published in the Libertarian Review.

Bob sits down with the managing editor of the Libertarian Institute, Keith Knight, to sample arguments from his recent four-hour video cataloguing sixty-four problems with democratic socialism.Related:Find More from Keith Here: Mises.org/HAP559a64 Arguments Against Democratic Socialism: Mises.org/HAP559bKeith's Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism: Mises.org/HAP559c

Ryan McMaken, Timothy Terrell, Charles Sauer, and Robert Murphy take questions from the audience on healthcare economics, free market alternatives, and the prospects for reform. Moderated by Connor O'Keeffe.Recorded in Windham, New Hampshire, on June 27, 2026. Special thanks to Joe and Tracy Matarese for sponsoring this event. 

Bob makes the case that American healthcare's dysfunction is not a market failure but a pricing failure manufactured by government. He closes with practical reform proposals designed to restore market signals without waiting for Washington.Recorded in Windham, New Hampshire, on June 27, 2026. Special thanks to Joe and Tracy Matarese for sponsoring this event. 

Why do so many intellectuals despise the market that sustains them? Ralph Raico weighs Hayek's theory of "scientism" against Schumpeter's portrait of a resentful, over-produced intelligentsia—and finds both wanting, pointing instead to the harder puzzle: why capitalism's most successful intellectuals are so often its fiercest critics.Excerpted from chapter 3 of Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School.

Charles Sauer profiles four healthcare entrepreneurs who built functioning free-market alternatives to the broken hospital system before turning to Washington to explain why Capitol Hill is not the solution, walking through the government-created distortions that sustain the status quo.Recorded in Windham, New Hampshire, on June 27, 2026. Special thanks to Joe and Tracy Matarese for sponsoring this event. 

Timothy Terrell traces the historical origins of the American healthcare cartel, beginning with Ronald Hamowy's 1979 article documenting how the AMA used state licensing laws not to protect patients but to restrict physician supply and raise incomes.Recorded in Windham, New Hampshire, on June 27, 2026. Special thanks to Joe and Tracy Matarese for sponsoring this event. 

Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty. No matter whether it is their intention or not, almost anything that the rich can legally do tends to help the poor.