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Mark Thornton follows up on last week’s episode by arguing that the Trump administration, Chairman Warsh, and Secretary Bessent are using short-term maneuvers to hide long-term economic and geopolitical problems. He focuses on Bessent’s “Operation Economic Outcast,” the failure to isolate Iran, weakening foreign demand for US bonds, the breakdown of the petrodollar order, and the growing risks created by war, sanctions, and fiscal denial. On Side B, Thornton joins Mario Innecco to discuss the bond market, inflation, war, the AI bubble, and why productivity gains cannot cure monetary inflation. They also turn to the deeper political problem: elite control, rising unrest, and the need for a bottom-up ideological revolution rooted in sound economics and limited government.2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure through September 30. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/issuesfree20% off listener offer on the insulated Minor Issues tumbler and three of Mark's books: https://mises.org/MinorIssuesTumbler. Use coupon code Thornton.Be sure to follow Minor Issues at https://Mises.org/MinorIssues

On this episode of Power & Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho talk about new highs in bond yields, why that matters, and whether or not a new round of $5,000 Trump bucks will solve America's affordability crisis.

The drama continues in college sports—not on the field, but in the courtrooms—thanks to judges applying antitrust law that does not permit the NCAA to be able to enforce its own rules.Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/college-sports-lsu-and-judge-shopping-anarcho-tyranny-continues

Mark Thornton opens by tracing the Soros-linked circle of Scott Bessent, Stanley Druckenmiller, and Kevin Warsh, arguing that Treasury and Fed officials are using currency moves, bond buybacks, and market-signaling games to hold the system together through Election Day. He connects Bessent’s yen and Treasury interventions, Warsh’s Jackson Hole remarks, gold and silver volatility, and the broader effort to mask weak bond markets and a falling dollar. On Side B, Mark joins TastyLive to discuss the market consequences: precious metals and commodities as relief valves, AI debt as a classic Austrian business cycle malinvestment, why productivity gains cannot cure monetary inflation, and why rate hikes may hurt financial markets and indebted consumers without fixing war-driven price shocks.2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure through September 30. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/issuesfree20% off listener offer on the insulated Minor Issues tumbler and three of Mark's books: https://mises.org/MinorIssuesTumbler. Use coupon code Thornton.Be sure to follow Minor Issues at https://Mises.org/MinorIssues

On this episode of Power & Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho hit on a variety of topics, including meaningful rollbacks of Flock in the south, a look at immigration protests in Spain, and Washington's new corporate oil deals in Venezuela. 

David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973 as a body more elite than the CFR, and it placed its people in office. Rothbard runs through the Carter appointments post by post, from Brzezinski and Vance to Volcker at the Fed, closing on a 1984 field in which every front-runner was a Trilateralist.

Johnson kept the hawks and replaced doves as they were ousted. Rothbard details the July 1965 meeting at which escalation was decided and the committee of power-elite figures formed to back it, along with Ellsworth Bunker’s role in the invasion of the Dominican Republic and the sugar interests it protected.

Rothbard traces Kennedy’s foreign policy appointments back to Lovett, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lehman Brothers, then to the Bay of Pigs and the sugar company interests entangled with it. The chapter closes on Kennedy’s last foreign policy act: the green light to oust and murder South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm.

The Council on Foreign Relations emerged from a 1921 merger, Morgan-dominated from top to bottom, with Elihu Root as honorary president and Morgan’s chief counsel as president. Rothbard recounts the founding of its journal Foreign Affairs, and how after World War II the Rockefellers displaced the Morgans as the senior partners of the Eastern Establishment.

Rothbard traces the Milner Group from Rhodes’s 1891 society through its command of British postwar planning and the expert delegation at Versailles, to the founding of the Institute of International Affairs in Paris in 1919. Its first American member had come to notice by attacking the American Revolution and praising the eighteenth-century British Empire.

Established at the end of 1913, the Federal Reserve made Allied loans and wartime deficits possible by centralizing reserves and backstopping the banks. Rothbard traces the five-year campaign by Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb interests, then follows Benjamin Strong’s Morgan ties and the inflation undertaken to prop up the pound—setting the stage for the collapse of 1929 to 1931.

Blocked in China by Russia and a Belgian syndicate, an American banking consortium pressed Washington toward a harder Asian line. Rothbard follows the American China Development Company through the Boxer Rebellion to Theodore Roosevelt egging Japan on to attack Russia—and to the Morgan bargain backing McKinley in exchange for the gold standard.

After 1873 the House of Morgan became the leading investment firm in the country and, through Cleveland’s Democratic administrations, a decisive voice in foreign policy. Rothbard follows the Morgan and Rothschild men through the State, War, and Navy departments and into the gunboat diplomacy stretching from Nicaragua and Santo Domingo to the road to war with Spain.

Justin Raimondo places the essay in Rothbard’s career, showing how methodological individualism and the Austrian analysis of banking combine into a history of the American elite. He draws out the Nock, Flynn, and Chodorov insight at its center: the biggest capitalists have been the deadliest enemies of capitalism.

The neoliberal establishment has done much to define our highly-interventionist, inflationary, and crony system as true free-market capitalism. They shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that people are turning against it.Read the article here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-neoliberals-fueled-rise-socialism2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure through September 30. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/gabfreebookBe sure to follow the Guns and Butter podcast at https://Mises.org/GB

Rothbard draws the threads together and challenges the standard historiography. The inflation-versus-hard-money battle cut across region, class, wealth, and occupation—in Tennessee, the two opposing camps were led by wealthy cotton planters from the same city, and several inflationist governors reversed themselves after seeing their paper depreciate. He traces the lasting consequences: the protective movement's 1824 victory, the discrediting of state inconvertible paper, and the conversion of Jackson, Benton, Polk, Kendall, and Condy Raguet to hard money during these years. He closes by arguing that the Panic of 1819 helped launch American economics as a discipline, and left a permanent mark on how the country thought about money, debt, and depression.

The depression revived a dormant tariff movement and turned it into something close to a crusade. Rothbard follows Matthew Carey and the Philadelphia protectionists as they organized conventions, flooded Congress with memorials, and pressed the claim that free trade caused depression and protection would restore full employment. A high tariff bill was narrowly defeated in the Senate in 1820, along with companion measures to tax auction sales and end credit on import duties. The free-trade opposition, centered in the export-dependent South and New England shipping, countered that tariffs would deepen the collapse in commerce and agriculture, and that burdens on consumption should be reduced in a depression, not raised. The protectionists lost in 1820 and won in 1824.

The hard-money response held that excessive bank credit had caused the depression and that only rigid specie payment could end it. Rothbard catalogs the remedies proposed: confining banks to commercial cities, prohibiting small-denomination notes, barring interbank borrowing, forfeiting charters at the first refusal to redeem. Virginia's statesmen—Jefferson among them, along with Spencer Roane and the editor Thomas Ritchie—were the most uncompromising. This chapter also documents the American formulation of the currency principle and a monetary theory of the business cycle several years ahead of Thomas Joplin in England, and traces the hostility to the Second Bank of the United States that came from hard-money and soft-money camps alike.

A smaller but more theoretically ambitious group looked past the states to a national inconvertible currency. Rothbard examines their schemes in detail: suspension of specie payments by the Bank of the United States, permanent abandonment of redemption, and the elaborate proposal of "An Anti-Bullionist," who anticipated a specie-exchange standard with a government board regulating note issue against foreign exchange rates. Thomas Law of Washington emerged as the movement's leading advocate. None of the plans reached a vote, but Treasury Secretary Crawford's reluctant rejection of the idea provoked some of the sharpest monetary analysis of the era.

Because banks were chartered by the states, the monetary fight was fought mainly in state legislatures, and Rothbard follows it across the Union. Proposals ranged from the modest—permitting failing banks to suspend specie payment while continuing to operate—to the radical creation of state-owned banks and loan offices issuing inconvertible paper. Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee went the full distance. Some states even attempted to outlaw the depreciation of bank notes by statute. The results converted several prominent inflationists, including future leaders of the Jacksonian hard-money movement.

Rothbard sets the stage with a portrait of a young agrarian republic transformed by the War of 1812. Foreign trade collapsed and domestic manufacturing surged; loosely regulated state banks multiplied, issuing notes with little specie behind them; credit poured into western land purchases at inflated prices. When the Second Bank of the United States reversed course and forced contraction, the whole structure came down. This chapter supplies the economic environment for everything that follows, and answers a question of lasting theoretical interest: was 1819 a genuine business-cycle depression of the modern type?

The debtors' plight was the most visible face of the depression, and the most politically explosive. Rothbard traces two distinct battles: the federal question of the $23 million owed on public land purchases, where Congress and President Monroe moved to forgive interest and permit relinquishment; and the state-level fight over stay laws and minimum appraisal laws, which spread through eight and four states respectively. Relief advocates argued that the rising purchasing power of the dollar had made repayment unjust. Their opponents answered that shielding debtors would destroy creditor confidence and prolong the very depression it aimed to cure.

Kevin Duffy reads gold's bull market through an Austrian investor's lens — America's "imperial bubble" and the gold demand driving it from a rising East.Recorded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 15, 2026. Special thanks to George and Sally Gundrey for sponsoring this event. 

JP Cortez argues fiat money is a hidden theft, and that the fix is a bottom-up, state-level push to remove the taxes and rules that stop Americans from freely choosing gold and silver.Recorded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 15, 2026. Special thanks to George and Sally Gundrey for sponsoring this event. 

Mark Thornton revisits his Mises University lecture on government intervention and economic inequality, arguing that intervention does not merely shrink the economic pie: it changes who gets the biggest slices. Drawing on Rothbard’s distinction between specific and general factors of production, Mark also shows how regulations, subsidies, tariffs, licensing, healthcare rules, and monetary policy reward protected firms, specialized capital, and politically favored workers while forcing everyone else into less productive, lower-paying alternatives.On Side B, Mark joins the David Lynn Show to discuss tariffs, the Fed, the business cycle, the Skyscraper Curse, AI data centers, war risks, diesel and fertilizer shortages, and why today’s boom may be approaching its breaking point.2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar through August 31. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/issuesfree20% off listener offer on the insulated Minor Issues tumbler and three of Mark's books: https://mises.org/MinorIssuesTumbler. Use coupon code Thornton.Be sure to follow Minor Issues at https://Mises.org/MinorIssues

Mark Thornton returns to Rothbard’s idea of major party realignment, arguing that ideology—not interest-group politics alone—drives long-term political change. He applies that framework to today’s Republican Party, tracing its roots in crony capitalism, protectionism, prohibitionism, and single-issue coalitions, while arguing that the modern uniparty supports inflation, war, runaway spending, debt, and the erosion of the middle class.On Side B, Mark joins Little by Little to discuss war, business cycles, bond-market distrust, private credit, gold, AI, and the growing divide between official statistics and household reality. He warns that political barriers can delay realignment only so long before pressure builds toward revolution, but closes with optimism: young Americans are increasingly rejecting the parties, the media, and state propaganda—and are more open to Austrian economics than ever.Additional Resources"Major Party Realignment" by Mark Thornton (Minor Issues, Episode 186): https://mises.org/podcasts/minor-issues/major-party-realignment"The Transformation of the American Party System" by Murray N. Rothbard: https://mises.org/mises-daily/transformation-american-party-system"Taking Government Out of Politics: Murray Rothbard on Political and Local Reform during the Progressive Era" by Patrick Newman (Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics): https://mises.org/quarterly-journal-austrian-economics/taking-government-out-politics-murray-rothbard-political-and-local-reform-during-progressive-era"Murray Rothbard’s Lessons for the Right" by David Brady Jr. (Modern Age Journal): https://modernagejournal.com/murray-rothbard-conservative-libertarian/2547542026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar through August 31. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/issuesfree20% off listener offer on the insulated Minor Issues tumbler and three of Mark's books: https://mises.org/MinorIssuesTumbler. Use coupon code Thornton.Be sure to follow Minor Issues at https://Mises.org/MinorIssues

Fauci is back in the limelight after the release of his diary before a Senate hearing last week. And that’s good, because the career of Anthony Fauci can teach us a lot about where power actually resides in America and how our system really works.Read the article here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/what-anthony-fauci-teaches-us-about-american-government2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar through August 31. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/gabfreebookBe sure to follow the Guns and Butter podcast at https://Mises.org/GB

Bob returns to the fractional reserve banking debate to clarify a point the critics keep missing: in the Mises-Hayek-Rothbard framework, it's fractional reserve banking itself that sets the boom-bust cycle in motion, not merely central banks.Related:Lawrence White, Free Banking in Britain: Mises.org/HAP561aBob's Previous Episode on Rothbard vs Free Bankers: Mises.org/HAP561bBob's Paper on the History of Fractional Reserve Free Banking: Mises.org/HAP561cRoger Garrison's Presentations on Capital-Based Macroeconomics: Mises.org/HAP561d

The transition problem. Rothbard weighs forcing deflation down to the existing gold stock against raising the gold price to match the dollar supply, defends deflation against its reputation, and sets out a six-point program. He parts with Mises and Hazlitt on sequencing, and closes by insisting that scholars must argue for what is true rather than for what is currently expedient.

Rothbard places the 100 percent program in the classical economists and the currency school, and in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian political tradition—figures he argues historians have miscast as economically ignorant agrarians. He credits Condy Raguet with seeing before the British that deposits are money substitutes too, and recovers the neglected Charles H. Carroll and Isaiah W. Sylvester.

Leland Yeager, an advocate of freely fluctuating fiat money, concedes that a 100 percent gold standard would end reserve drains, forced contraction, and balance-of-payments anxiety—problems he attributes to fractional reserves rather than to gold. Rothbard quotes him at length, asks why he rejects what he has just praised, and pushes the reductio further: where exactly is the geographical boundary of a money?

The standard objections, taken in turn. If banks could not profit under 100 percent reserves, they may charge for their services as every other useful business does. And the fear of an inadequate money supply misses the classical lesson that any change in the quantity of money adjusts itself in purchasing power—leaving population, trade volume, and a stable price level as arbitrary criteria.

Why governments prefer money creation to taxation: the benefits are plain to whoever receives the new money first, while the losses stay hidden from everyone else. Rothbard traces how the two natural checks on a bank—redemption by outsiders and a run by its own clients—were widened by central banking, by suspensions of specie payment, and by campaigns to shame the public out of using gold day to day.

Rothbard argues that 1931–33 was the last step in a long process rather than a sudden break. Government’s compulsory monopoly of coinage came first, defended by fears of private fraud that the long record of official debasement makes hollow. He answers the Gresham’s Law objection, then traces how the royal stamp shifted emphasis from a coin’s weight to its name.

The conceptual core of the essay. Rothbard answers the charge that gold advocates want government to fix a price by rejecting its premise—“dollar” was never an independent entity but a name for a weight of gold. He shows how money is properly obtained only through production, and argues that a bare name could never have arisen as money on a free market.

Rothbard declines both the fashionable dismissal of gold and the restorationist call to return to the pre-1933 standard, which he judges too far decayed to have lasted. He then states his ethical premise plainly: the free market, extended to money itself. Against the claim that money is whatever government says it is, he warns that command of the unit of account is command of the whole society.

Writing in 1991, Rothbard sets the essay in its original context: Bretton Woods as an international dollar standard masquerading as a gold standard. He contrasts it with the classical pre-1914 system, in which every currency was a defined weight of gold redeemable on demand, then recounts how the breakdowns of 1968 and 1971 tested Misesian predictions against an Establishment certain that gold would fall to $6 an ounce.

Reviewing Lawrence H. White's Free Banking in Britain, Murray Rothbard dismantles the claim that Scotland enjoyed a century of successful free banking before the Peel Act of 1845. Drawing on Sydney Checkland's history, he shows that the Scottish banks pyramided credit on the Bank of England rather than standing on their own specie, suspended payment alongside England from 1797 to 1821, and let reserves fall from 10–20 percent to as little as 1 percent, while depositors who asked for gold met argument, rebuff, and the threat of losing future credit. The rarity of bank failure that White counts as proof of success, Rothbard argues, is evidence of the opposite.

Bob reviews Murray Rothbard's 1988 essay "The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland," his sharp response to Larry White's influential account of Scottish free banking.Related:Rothbard's Article, "The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland": Mises.org/HAP560aBob's Debate with George Selgin on Fractional Reserve Banking: Mises.org/HAP560bGeorge Selgin's Article, "Scottish Banks and the Bank Restriction, 1797–1821": Mises.org/HAP560cJoe Salerno's Article on Mises as Currency School Free Banker: Mises.org/HAP560dLawrence White, Free Banking in Britain Mises.org/HAP560e

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.

On the Declaration's 250th anniversary, Larsen Plyler asks what the document was actually written to do. Taking Justice Clarence Thomas's recent claim that it ranks among the West's great anti-slavery documents as his starting point, Plyler argues that the Declaration's legacy has been shaped less by Jefferson than by Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., who read a later conception of equality and a single unified nation back into it. Returning the text to its context—grievances aimed at the king alone, a closing paragraph declaring thirteen free and independent states—he makes the case for the legacy that got lost.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.

Egalitarians assume people would be equal but for oppression or the random hand of luck, and that where injustice can't be shown, luck alone justifies equalizing by force. Joshua Mawhorter turns the presupposition around. Drawing on Rothbard's Egalitarianism: A Revolt Against Nature and Sowell's Discrimination and Disparities, he argues that inequality is the normal condition of a world of scarcity, change, time, and choice; that it is precisely what makes exchange possible; and that the only equality worth defending is equality of liberty under the rule of law.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.

Is neoliberalism a real intellectual tradition or just an insult? Tho Bishop argues it is real and precise: a program for a regulated market economy running on technocratically managed, socialized money. He traces it from Henry Simons's 1934 "A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire" into the Mont Pelerin Society—where Mises watched enthusiasm for antitrust and credit expansion take root, and where the vacuum left by Hayek was filled by Chicago rather than by libertarians—and forward through Friedman's career to Greenspan and Bernanke. The Rothbardians, he concludes, have been the only sustained non-socialist opposition.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.

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.