Mises Institute

On this episode of Power and Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho discuss the recent SCOTUS decisions as well as JD Vance's recent praise for the economic views of Alexander Hamilton.

How the Industrial Revolution and foreign investment made some nations rich while others stayed poor, closing with Mises’s defense of capitalism.

The crucial difference between physical “capital goods” and “capital” as an accounting concept, and how profit and loss, private property, and economic calculation steer production toward what consumers actually want.

The two great confusions about money and interest, from Aristotle’s “money cannot beget money” to modern credit expansion, and how monetary manipulation by banks and governments produces inflation and the business cycle.

The first economics lecture: how saving, capital goods, and investment build modern prosperity—illustrated by the fisherman who forgoes today’s catch to make nets—and why capital must be guided by economic calculation.

Why Marxism spread so widely while going long unchallenged, how its slogans slipped into everyday speech, and the Marxian urge to “organize” society by treating individuals as raw material to be arranged.

How Marxism claims that truth itself is attainable only in a classless society, and how the cult of “action” and violence—by way of Georges Sorel and French syndicalism—fed into Leninism, fascism, and Nazi racial doctrine.

The liberal ideal of the individual and rational, welfare-serving law, and a defense of the Industrial Revolution against the myth that early capitalism degraded the common man.

Marx’s doctrine of class and class conflict: the claim that class interests determine how people think and set the classes in irreconcilable conflict—with Mises noting that Marx never actually defined what a class is.