Mobilization and separation, not persuasion, is the way forward. Original Article: “2021: Welcome to Post-persuasion America” This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.  

Welcome to 2021 in post-persuasion America!   I first heard this term used by Steve Bannon, architect of the surprising 2016 Trump campaign, in a PBS Frontline documentary titled “America’s Great Divide.” Speaking way back in the pre-Covid days of early 2020, Bannon asserted the information age makes us less curious and willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. We have access to virtually …

Professor Janek Wasserman’s book The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas, is an entertaining and fascinating account of key players and events in the evolution of Austrian school economics. Jeff Deist details the good, bad, and ugly of the book, written by a left-progressive historian from a critical perspective.  Read Jeff …

[Excerpt from a talk by the same name delivered at the Mises Institute’s annual Supporters Summit, Jekyll Island, Georgia, October 9, 2020.] I’d like to talk to you this afternoon about two classes of Americans, and it may not be the two classes you think of, but nonetheless, there are two distinct classes in America, …

YouTube, the dominant video platform owned by Google, decided yesterday to remove a Mises Institute video. This decision apparently lasts for all eternity, cannot be appealed to an actual human, and comes with this friendly admonition: “Because it’s the first time, this is just a warning. If it happens again, your channel will get a strike and you won’t be able to do things like upload, post, or live stream for 1 week.”
The video, a talk by Tom Woods titled “The Covid Cult” with more than 1.5 million views, was recorded at our live event in Texas two weeks ago. It offered challenges to the official narrative surrounding the coronavirus, particularly with respect to mask mandates. Woods’s talk featured several charts showing rises

[This is the transcript of the eponymous talk presented at the Mises Institute’s Ron Paul Symposium on November 7, 2020, in Angleton, Texas.] Hey, what a week for our sacred democracy. Wow! You know, it’s so sacred that just a few thousand votes in a few states here and there could have turned it from …

The goal of this national psychosis which they produce and impose on us every four years is demoralization, more than anything. Don’t let that happen. Presented at the Symposium with Ron Paul on Saturday, 7 November 2020, in Angleton, Texas.

Things don’t have to be this way. Original Article: “What Will It Take for Americans to Consider Breaking Up?”. This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

Why don’t elections bring harmony and closure rather than ever greater political friction? Hans-Hermann Hoppe explained all of the fundamental problems with mass democracy more than 20 years ago in Democracy: The God That Failed. Jeff Deist finishes his series on this devastating classic with a look at Hoppe’s final chapters, critiquing conservatism, liberalism, and …

In 2020, privilege manifests as political extortion. Push back against these bullies. This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros. Original Article: “The Privilege of Politics”.

We have had nearly eight months of life and liberty stolen from us by politicians and their hysteria-promoting accomplices in media. How much more will we accept?This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack. Original Article: “The Absurdity of Covid ‘Cases'”.

Presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on 9 October 2020.

Most of you know the great journalist Henry Hazlitt for his remarkable Economics in One Lesson. But in this episode, Jeff Deist discusses Hazlitt’s virtually unknown 1942 book A New Constitution Now, which is nothing short of a how-to guide for remaking the US constitutional system. Hazlitt was concerned about FDR’s third term and what …

Today’s headlines announced Donald and Melania Trump “tested positive” for covid-19. Another claims nineteen thousand Amazon workers “got” covid-19 on the job. Both of these pseudostories are sure to ignite another absurd media frenzy.  As always, the story keeps changing: Remember ventilators, flatten the curve, the next two weeks are crucial, etc.? Remember Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown …

In a very real sense Dr. Paul is the only Misesian ever to serve in Congress.  Narrated by the author. Original Article: “Ron Paul Remains Unstoppable​”.

When Dr. Ron Paul suffered a health scare during his live Liberty Report show last Friday, I was perhaps less worried than most of his friends, family, and fans. His remarkable vitality, vigor, and energy are well known to those around him, along with his penchant for exercise, clean living, and light eating. Having known him thirty years, I simply had no recollection of him ever being sick or out of commission. This is a man who had never missed a day of work or an event, at least in my memory. In my mind he was simply always there, a fixed feature of life. So my immediate reaction was to think he would be fine.
As it turns out, he is fine. Even unstoppable.
In Dr. Paul’s congressional office during the early 2000s, his

When Dr. Ron Paul suffered a health scare during his live Liberty Report show last Friday, I was perhaps less worried than most of his friends, family, and fans. His remarkable vitality, vigor, and energy are well known to those around him, along with his penchant for exercise, clean living, and light eating. Having known him thirty years, I simply …

This is astonishing, even by 2020 standards. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, operating under the US Department of Health and Human Services, has asserted jurisdiction over private residential leases nationwide. This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack. Original Article: “The CDC Is America’s New Landlord​”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, operating under the US Department of Health and Human Services, has asserted jurisdiction over private residential leases nationwide. It intends to curtail evictions until at least the end of the year, and in fact its new directive threatens federal criminal penalties against landlords who ignore tenant “declarations” made using CDC forms.
It is unclear, to put it mildly, exactly how this jurisdiction over private contracts and state/local courts flows even to Congress, much less an administrative agency acting on its own. One federal official justifies the bizarre and legally dubious action based on the CDC’s broad charter to stop the spread of communicable diseases—a charter at

Last time we met in Orlando, Bob Murphy mentioned how much worse our political and social divide would be if the economy crashed like 2008. Now we face this very problem—with COVID-19 lockdowns and George Floyd protests decimating the economy and social media exposing raw animosity along racial and “woke” lines. Congress and the Fed …

Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism and one leader of a new “national conservatism” project, recently wrote an important and compelling article for Quillette titled “The Challenge of Marxism.” Hazony says out loud what few Western intellectuals will admit, namely that liberalism is not holding and has not triumphed in 2020 America and Europe. We have not reached the end of history.
Our criticism lies not with Hazony’s thesis, but with his particular conception of what liberalism is, what it has become, and what it should be.
Hazony laments, correctly, the expressly Marxist takeover of once liberal institutions, especially “mainstream media, universities, tech companies, philanthropies, and government bureaucracies.”

Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism and one leader of a new “national conservatism” project, recently wrote an important and compelling article for Quillette titled “The Challenge of Marxism.” Hazony says out loud what few Western intellectuals will admit, namely that liberalism is not holding and has not triumphed in 2020 America and …

Fed bugs sound like real estate agents in reverse: there is never a good time to buy gold. This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros. Original Article: “Why Fed Bugs Really, Really Hate Gold​”.

Populists need a status quo to oppose, but now Trump stands as the incumbent. This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros. Original Article: “Trump Agonistes”.

Can Donald Trump, against all odds, still win in November?
It would be a remarkable political feat, on par with his stunning upset in 2016. A global pandemic (however statistically dubious) ravages the country, while riots ravage major US cities. The US economy produces a third less than it did a year ago, 40 million people are out of work and dependent on federal benefits, and 60 percent of all restaurants may go under. Millions of Americans will not pay rent, mortgages, or credit card bills for the foreseeable future. Millions of their kids will not go to school at all, or will simply stare at their teachers on Zoom. Others wear face shields and sit behind plastic screens at their desks. College football, a religion in America,

Can Donald Trump, against all odds, still win in November?  It would be a remarkable political feat, on par with his stunning upset in 2016. A global pandemic (however statistically dubious) ravages the country, while riots ravage major US cities. The US economy produces a third less than it did a year ago, 40 million …

Imagine creating a graduate school in economics today, from scratch. What would it look like? For starters, it would be online, inexpensive, fast, flexible, and taught using the great treatises. It would stress economic history. It would be rigorous. It would focus on fundamentals. And critically, it would teach real economics from an Austrian perspective. …

Judy Shelton, a Trump nominee to the Fed Board of Governors, may not have coined the excellent term “Fed Bug,” but she used it to delicious effect in this 2019 Financial Times interview:
“People call me a goldbug, and I think, well, what does that make them? A Fed bug,” she says.
Can anyone the ​New York Times attacks this dishonestly be all bad?
For our purposes, Fed Bugs are people with a faith-based belief in the power of central banks (and central bankers) to engineer economic growth using “monetary policy,”despite decades of history and current evidence to the contrary. They believe tinkering with inputs and rates and velocity and flows somehow makes us richer in terms of productivity, goods, and services. They believe in

Judy Shelton, a Trump nominee to the Fed Board of Governors, may not have coined the excellent term “Fed bug,” but she used it to delicious effect in this 2019 Financial Times interview: “People call me a goldbug, and I think, well, what does that make them? A Fed bug,” she says. Can anyone the ​New York Times attacks this dishonestly be all bad?For …

Dear Portlandia progressives: a federal government big enough to take care of you is a federal government big enough to “take care of  you.”
Scary unidentifiable police, federal black sites, and procedureless snatching of individuals from the streets are the wholly predictable and natural consequences of the very policies you advocated for decades. Why do you imagine a big government with lots of power will restrict itself to the cozy “social issues” and economic takings you support? Government can seize the means of production, but not seize you? You wanted everything run from DC, and you got what you wanted. Plus you certainly would be every bit as outraged if federal agents concerned about the undermining of