 Hey guys, this is Stowe Bishop with Radio Rothbard and I want to let you guys know about the first Mises event of 2024. On February 17th, we will be returning to beautiful Tampa, Florida for an event dedicated to inflation, causes, consequences, and the cure. While the government tries to hide the consequences of inflation and their official statistics, Americans see and feel it every time they visit the grocery store. The state and its media lap dogs try to blame inflation on corporate greed, but the true source of inflation is the Federal Reserve and the banking system. We're going to be tackling this issue with a great lineup of speakers, including Joseph Salerno, Patrick Newman, and our new Mises president, the great Tom DeLorenzo. We have a special code for Radio Rothbard viewers for a 15% discount. That's Rothbard24 and you can find more about this event at Mises.org slash Tampa 2024. Hey guys, this is Stowe Bishop with Radio Rothbard and we've got another great offer for Radio Rothbard listeners. We have a free book that we want to send directly to your doorstep. If you are a fan of this show, you have no doubt heard us discuss Murray Rothbard's classic anatomy of the state, his dive into the mechanics of the state as we know it, what the state fears, what its greatest threats are. It is one of the all-time best Rothbard reads, a personal favorite of both myself and Ryan. You can get your free copy as a Radio Rothbard listener by visiting Mises.org slash Rothpod free. That's R-O-T-H-P-O-D free. You can also find the link in our show notes. Welcome back to Radio Rothbard. This is Thowe Bishop joined as always by my co-host, Ryan McMakin, and we've got a special guest today, Dr. Patrick Newman, author of Cronyism, Liberty vs. Power in Early America and along with other great Rothbard treatises that he has translated and edited. A man that probably needs no introduction to our audience and the topic of today are some predictions for 2024 and continuing our conversation from last week about the economy, the state, the dollar, the Fed, all of those great topics. And I in particular wanted Patrick on this show because if you have not seen it yet, I highly recommend it. He was one of our speakers at a recent Mises event in Fort Myers, Florida on the topic of the Fed inflation, kind of the political ramifications for 2024. And there Patrick actually made a prediction that is aging quite nicely about how the Fed might be bowing to some political pressures going into 2024. The recent news from Powell indicating a potential pivot in Fed policy, again, the expectation according to their great dot plot of perhaps even three interest rate cuts next year seems to be justifying some of Patrick's predictions made in there. And I know one prediction that we can have for 2024 is a new edition of Cronyism coming out, which I highly recommend already. I got to have a special or early peek at some of the work that Patrick's been going on there. So that's all very exciting stuff. And so Patrick, how are you doing in this last radio Rothbard of 2023? I'm doing good. First of all, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to talk to both of you about the economy and all that entails. And doing well, getting ready for the holiday season, I guess, the Christmas is trying like so many other consumers, trying to frantically buy gifts, running down my savings to consume more. No, I'm just kidding. But you know, we are interested in looking at the holiday data and the spending data and the retail sales and all that stuff. So the end of the year is going nicely. I hope you guys are doing well as well. Well, you've already torn down the facade we have. So sorry to our audience. We are recording this before Christmas. So if there's anything crazy that happens in the news cycle between here and there, that will help explain why we might not be mentioning some sort of a great global catastrophe or some Black Swan event that might have come out between now and after Christmas. But with that being said, starting off again as a historian, as an expert on cronyism, you have never shied away from your analysis on monetary policy, what the Fed is going to do next, buying into the great myth of our times of Fed independence and the separation of central bank and power. And so just starting off, given that for those who may not be aware there is a presidential election going on next year, what are your general thoughts and expectations going into what is certainly going to be the most important election of our lifetimes? Yes. Yes. This is year X, which means we know that year X plus one, that's the most important election coming up. So we all need to be ready for that. And it's certainly going to be an interesting year. I mean, at least until yesterday I was saying there's a high chance of a Trump-Biden rematch. But now we've got to figure out if Trump's going to be on the ballot, though I think he will. I think that's just some, for people who don't know, the Colorado Supreme Court has basically tried to throw Trump off the ballot. I think that's a little bit of political theater, but we'll see. So it's certainly going to be, I think, an interesting year just because of election years always are. And I think it's clear that we've ended the end of the rate hiking, the rate hiking cycle, so to speak, the end of the rate hikes. And now we're kind of in this period where everybody's jonesing for a rate cut, so to speak, right? Everybody's getting ready for 25, 50, 75 basis points. And the Fed not too long ago kind of let it slip that they're maybe thinking about 75 basis points of cuts. So like three cuts, I believe, of about 2.5% each, percentage points each. And that has led to a lot of, you could say optimism in the stock market, optimism among various sectors of the economy, hoping that the Fed is going to lower rates, not only by that, but by so much more, right? So the Fed is trying to engage in what they have previously called forward guidance. They're trying to tell you in the present what they're going to do in the future in the hopes that that will influence your actions in the present. So they're saying that we're going to cut rates, it's sort of like the dragons in Game of Thrones, right? They're going to be coming, right? The rate cuts, they're coming. And that's going to try to make people more optimistic now to think that, well, this tight money isn't going to last, it's okay to spend, it's okay to invest in the stock market, and so on. And right now, markets are kind of taking the ball and going with it. And the Fed is trying to now, of course, rein them in. But I think it's going to be an interesting story. I mean, we'll talk much more about this over the podcast, but just to try to figure out, okay, well, is economic conditions kind of continue to soften, so to speak? Especially among various sectors like commercial real estate in other areas, is the Fed going to cut? How much are they going to cut during 2024? Will inflation that final mile prove the most difficult to get rid of? I mean, I thought it was quite astonishing, the Fed was saying they're going to pivot when inflation's at 3% and core inflation's at 4%. It's almost as if you go on this diet for like 15 weeks, and you're not even at your weight goal, but you're already planning your cheat meals, right? You're sort of doing something like that. It's like, well, aren't you supposed to stay on the diet? You go on the low carb diet, you're supposed to remain on it. It's not just you don't eat pasta for two months, and then you can go get a little Caesar's Pizza, something like that. Yeah, it's interesting. One of my favorite measures of inflation is the salary increases that the federal government gives their own employees. As I mentioned last week with Mark, that I've got a buddy that is part of that apparatus, getting glad he's getting that money rather than others. The salary increase in his division was over 5% this year, so that's his own measurement there, what the Fed really sees the increase in cost of living. I know one of the topics, and you made a rather bold prediction during that Fort Myers event, which again, I encourage everyone to see in full detail, get to see Patrick on our wonderful camera setup that we have there and your great PowerPoint skills, is that while we had other speakers predicting a recession for 2024, you thought that it might hold off in part because of the potential for the Fed softening some of its stands there. Can you address that a little bit more? Yeah, sure. When it comes to forecasting, I've learned that forecasting can be a crapshoot. Economic history is explaining- We're putting on you the spot right now, Patrick. If people are going to be out there, putting all of their- They're going to be Patrick Newman maximalists, and they're going to bet their entire fortune based on what you say next. Yeah, so I would say the most best store of value is not gold, it's not Bitcoin, it's copies of cronyism. That value will remain constant, so if you want to protect yourself against the coming catastrophe, stockpile on cronyisms, and also the next one that's going to come out. One cronyism equals one cronyism. Exactly. One cronyism equals one cronyism. It's a unit of account. It's a measuring rod. It's constant. Forecasting can be very, very tough. A lot of people, not just Austrians, were predicting a recession. If this was late 2022, saying that, well, we are entering a recession in 2023, that did not materialize, at least they've announced. We can look at the data, try and look under the hood and see what's going on. In terms of a visible recession of rising unemployment, we haven't seen that. Just like a year before, people were saying inflation wasn't going to be a problem, and then inflation was a problem and so on. Of course, what happens in 2024, here at the Austrian business cycle theory, I think that the data is least consistent with that, so we should expect some tightening to lead to deteriorating economic condition. However, timing is always a factor, how quickly the Fed tightens, engages in credit contraction, how long it takes for that to affect the actual economy, what else is going on around the same time. Any sort of positive supply shocks. Over the past year, we've been hit with certainly a very big positive supply shock that we're still feeling the ramifications of, and that's, of course, artificial intelligence. It's no coincidence that I think that the last successful soft landing that the Fed engineered, quote, unquote, was in 1995. Shortly thereafter, you saw the big rise of the internet around that time, so could there be something like that, potentially. But I think that when we're looking at how long it takes for the Fed tightening to affect the economy, I was looking at gross domestic product as a measure of nominal spending, and it showed that at least looking at it over the past year, since mid 2022 through mid 2023, nominal spending hadn't really cooled down that much, which meant that the Fed's tightening had not yet affected the economy. However, about a month or so after statistics on gross domestic income, which is the flip side of gross domestic product for all the money spent on final goods and services, someone has to actually earn that in the form of wages, rents, profits, whatever. And it's been a bit of a conundrum among economists. Usually those numbers are a little different with measurement error. Post-COVID, they've been more different than average, to say the least. And in 2022, when a lot of people were saying there was going to be a recession, various people saying that inflation was transitory or all sorts of other things were okay. Janet Yellen was one of these people saying that, well, even though gross domestic product's going down, you also have to look at gross domestic income, which is doing relatively strong and we should average them together. And when you average them together, you see there's no recession in 2022. Okay, fair enough. But now that it's kind of flipped the other way, we're now GDP is stronger than GDI, you don't hear that anymore. But when you average the two of them, both the nominal series and the real series, which is not something original to me, there's plenty of economists trying to do this, the economic condition in 2023 does look a bit weaker. I mean, there's still been growth along a variety of metrics, earnings of corporations are still relatively strong. You haven't seen the cratering and unemployment or other things, but there has been a slowdown in nominal spending, at least looking at that. Now, does that really change what I was saying so much? I mean, it does say that nominal spending is cooling. But I still think there is, it does take time for this to really start to affect the economy. And a big part of this is that in 2024, really in late 2024, and especially in 2025, a lot of corporations are going to have to refinance their debt. And this is also true for commercial real estate loans, which are coming due in 2024. I think the residential housing market is in stronger shape than the commercial real estate market, which is a bit of a big issue because occupancy is still not returned to pre-COVID levels. And this is going to put these companies in binds because they're going to have to borrow at higher real interest rates. And I think that's when you're going to start to see the more visible deterioration. And I still think it's, I don't think it's going to happen like this big crash initially. After the Fed last raised rates in, we could say 2005, 2006, I mean, we really didn't start to see things deteriorate until the second half of 2007. And even then the NBER didn't declare that there's a recession until 2008. And they said, oh yeah, some would begin quite a bit earlier. So I think that there's room for a couple of things trying to weigh likely scenarios. This isn't the only thing that could happen. This is, I think, something that's the most likely, at least looking at the data, is that inflation is still going to be above target for a bit. Getting to that final 2% and maintaining it is crucial. I think that might take a little bit longer. We'll just have to see. It could dip down to 2%, but then there could be pressure putting it back up. I think the economy is going to let some air out, but things are still going to keep chugging. And then I think you're going to start to see some problems become more and more manifest with commercial real estate and other sorts of interest rate sectors and really a lot of, particularly some corporations and so on. But that's enough of my rambling for now. So hopefully I've made some sort of sense. Well, I think something to note is it's easy to overestimate how much the money supply has gone down in recent months and to underestimate just how huge was the injection of new money into the economy since 2020. Now, I published on the site these monthly updates to where the money supply is when calculated by Rothbard and Salerno's Austrian method that they developed, boy, at least 30 years ago. And if you look at that, yes, year over year, the total money supply plummeted for the last year. But even then, when you look at the total amount, you're still way above trend. I mean, you still got to knock off like another $4 trillion on the total money supply by that measure just to get back to what was already a significant uptrend that had occurred before 2020. And in recent months, the month to month number in money supplies basically flattened out. So it has not continued on a significant downward trajectory. So when you see these remarkable amounts of spending still going on in the economy, you can guess as to, well, I mean, you're still dealing with that huge injection of money that occurred over a period of two years from 2020 through 2022. And it just hasn't gone away. And then on top of that, you've got, as Daniel Lecaille points out, you've got massive amounts of deficit spending that the government continues to engage in. And that's plugging a lot of holes in terms of potential declines in overall spending. So it's not a traditional situation at all where you just, oh, look, all of these bubbles are popping because all of the extra money has already gone out of the economy. That just doesn't seem to be the situation at all. Yeah, those are great points. The money supply, we were at 450 pounds morbidly obese and we're sort of down to like 320. Significant progress, right? Maybe I'll put a 280, right? Big weight loss. But again, don't start talking about the cheat meals yet, so to speak, like, you know, it's still, it's still problematic weight. And especially because the demand for money has been declining or in a little bit more mainstream terminology, velocity has been rising and that's been keeping up spending. And people have just been depleting their quote unquote COVID savings, right? The excess money that the excess cash balances from all the money printing. And we are still seeing continued growth in the spending aggregates that is still going up and there's still more room because, and this is just the post 2008 world that we live in. There's so much extra gas in the tank that the banks, the commercial banking system can use to create loans or even, you know, the Fed. So we already started to see this a bit where markets went nuts after the Fed had the pivot. And we saw various bond yields decline or interest rates on various loans and so on. And the markets or the commercial banks almost or the financial sector is, they're already borrowing against the future, the future rate cuts so to speak, right? And that's kind of where it is, the market is and now the Fed's kind of trying to peddle back some of its statements saying, well, you know, we don't want to go that far. Don't think that there's going to be a cut in March, right? People are already expecting some sort of cut in March. I think one of the, oh yeah, before getting into that, I thought you made a great point regarding the deficit spending. That's another big issue. I think that's almost one of the biggest pressures the Fed faces is Uncle Sam, the interest rate costs have been ballooning for Congress and they want to have some method of basically lowering that. The deficit as a percentage of GDP is poised to increase in 2023 when we get the full data out compared to 2022, which is kind of unusual for a quote-unquote non-recession year. And that's going to pose additional pressures and difficulties. I also thought, I believe it was Douglas Mackenzie on the private sector unemployment figure, private sector as a proportion of the overall jobs numbers showing that a lot of it's been driven by government jobs and this at least is correlating with a recession in the future. I think post-1970 at least, if you go back further and can get a little bit more murky, post-1970 at least is signaling a weakening labor market. I think it'd be very interesting to continue to look at that. But we're kind of in this, I guess I would say this world where we're now trying to figure out, all right, what's the new post-COVID normal and where are interest rates headed? Because I don't think we're going back to the less than 1% interest rates, even after the inflation and after the business cycle and so on. I think there's just too many structural changes. I think you have less savings overall just from more and more baby boomers going into their golden years and all of that. And that's just putting more pressure on the economy. And I think that's going to pose some structural problems that we aren't really forecasting or we aren't really taking consideration yet. And I think just the mood is for rate cuts because one thing that makes this very different from prior rate cycles is, of course, social media, where now you've got so many people constantly commenting and saying, oh, this is what the Fed should do. This is what the Fed should do. I think its ability to practice contractionary monetary policy with actually elevated real inflation-adjusted interest rates is going to be a lot harder because there's going to be constant pressure on the Fed to say to lower, even if the unemployment rate starts to creep up and you're going to see this happen. And you'll especially see this happen in 2024 when a Trump derangement syndrome probably starts to affect a lot of people. It goes into stage three or something and it's all wrapped up in this. And I think it's likely that we'll just see the economic situation continue in its current state for a bit, but that doesn't mean that a soft landing has been achieved. It takes more time to figure that out. And I think there still is some potential for some problems to resurface for the Fed that markets are not fully anticipating right now. Well, there's another interesting dynamic out there. There was a hearing a few weeks ago with the Senate Banking Committee where when we talk about money supply increases, obviously I think a lot of our audience understands that it's not simply what the Fed does, that the banks play a major role in the creation of money. And one of the issues out there that doesn't get a whole lot of attention, but it's a dynamic where the Fed, the FDIC, and the Office of the Comptroller has pushed for new basal regulations, which is some of the banking regulations. And there's been various iterations, particularly since the financial crisis, that will increase the reserve requirements for banks that have at least 100 billion assets. So I think there's like 37 banks out there. So these are the biggest banks out there. And it's interesting seeing play out where you see bipartisan ship on both sides of this issue where you have the JP Morgan's of the world going out there and warning that if you actually require the banks to hold more reserves, then that is going to increase the cost of lending and things like that. And so there's a lot of push to prevent these regulations from coming into play. And so that's an aspect there where these banks are having to operate right now with the expectation that these rules are going to go into effect. But should that aspect of the regulatory side get taken away, and again, it seems as a whole again with that sort of bipartisan cooperation, yet it's quite possible that that ends up being the result there, the way that that will free up some of these banks to increase the money supply that they are currently not kind of engaging in is another one of those kind of inflation aspects out there that'll be interesting to see how that plays out going forward in the years ahead. Yeah, it will be interesting. Well, it's funny because the Fed has more or less gotten rid of reserve requirements since COVID. They're like, yeah, they don't really matter anymore. And it's teaching this to my students. I teach them in basic macroeconomics. You go through the four tools of monetary policy. It used to be three. Now it's four, but you go through reserve requirements. After you go, yeah, none of this matters anymore, at least for now. We'll find out though. But yeah, it'll be interesting to see what will happen. So far, banks have weathered the storm, so to speak, quite well. At the beginning of the year, there was a Silicon Valley bank and then problems and lots of fear over smaller banks. And the Fed had stopped its expansionary, excuse me, its contractionary monetary policy, its quantitative tightening briefly. And I thought this could have meant sort of the end of that. But then they've continued this. The small banks have at least held up. They know there's been no big collapses, though, of course, one thing to keep an eye out is a lot of commercial real estate is held by small banks. So if commercial real estate starts to suffer, these small regional banks are really going to take a hit. And we might be able to have some sort of inkling of how this will play out after the holiday season because it'll be very interesting to see what's the split between online orders and traditional brick and mortar retail stores, especially with malls and just regular department stores and all of that. But that's sort of a side note. I mean, I think, as Ryan alluded to, as Ryan mentioned, with the money supply, looking at things such as deposits and bank loans, those are all kind of flatlined. And it seems as though any sort of further tightening or decline is going to require the Fed to do something more. But now it's almost as if they've kind of bottomed out, if you will. And it'll be interesting to see the banking sector, will they actually continue to restrict, or will these new types of regulations or guidelines be put in place? It'll be very interesting to see how much of that happens, especially in early to mid 2024. I'm not too confident a whole lot will be done on that. But we'll see. I mean, it's definitely an interesting factor to look at. Well, even like the regional banks after Silicon Valley, the Fed came in and there's been all sorts of help provided to some of those banks, again, with some of those concerns out there about commercial real estate in particular and the way that regional banks are far more leveraged with those loans than the big banks out there. And so it'll be interesting to see, you know, as with every temporary measure as we've seen from the Fed, I'm sure we can have complete confidence that the kind of bumpers in the bowling lane will certainly be taken away as they promised. I think it was a year-long program and it has no chance at all of being expanded going forward because everything is so taught notch going on right now. But I get another aspect where there's been additional support given to the financial system. You know, during this time of surreal economic performance in the eyes of Paul Krutman. Well, I think one question, too, is that the listeners might have is, okay, when we say that there's no recession in 2024, what do we really mean by that? Like, what does the economy look like? And you try and search for historical situations. I think maybe you can point to situations where they've traded in recession for inflation in many cases. So say in the second half of the 70s, right? They were able to hold off an inflation for a while there and or rather, they were able to hold off a recession for a while there. You were just kind of banking on, okay, let's just keep the money supply going and we can push out this recession, hopefully into the 80s. And so that can work. The problem, of course, is that inflation is is the downside. And then you maybe Japan, maybe Japan's another example where after decades, you had a weak economy and it was a different situation. It was you had deflationary factors in many cases there. But you had an economy that went on for a long time and the standard of living went down very gradually, but you avoided recession for a very long period of time. And so when we're talking about, all right, we've caved, we've decided that we can live with more inflation in order to avoid any significant declines in overall employment. What does that really look like then in the daily lives of ordinary people, especially younger people? Yeah, that's a great question. And since you mentioned inflation, I was just thinking of this because it relates to what you're saying with higher inflation. Not too long ago, Jay Powell came out with a new basically guideline the Fed was going to follow where it wasn't going to be a strict 2% target, but it was almost going to be you let inflation go above 2% after years when it's been below 2% and then you're supposed to kind of let inflation go under 2% after inflation has been above 2%. So if inflation is running for say 5% one year, then the Fed wants it to maybe run at like 1%. The next two years or something to bring us down to the long run average of inflation, of 2% inflation. And we're not even there yet. So going off that, then we should expect a couple of years of below 2% inflation, but we're not even, that already has kind of been sort of thrown off the table at least. So it seems as though the Fed doesn't want to try to do that. And that's of course very telling in itself. And the tradeoff could be the Fed keeps the boom going so to speak. And so I think you could either see higher than average inflation and that would then of course hurt real wages. Real wages have kind of been, they've been rising since 2019 after you look at a bunch of stuff and adjusted for inflation, but they're below where they would have been much like the average of gross domestic product and gross domestic income. So you could see the stagnation that way through inflation or inflation is above target or you could see it and this could also happen of course with inflation, but we don't necessarily need to see price inflation with this as is what we've all been kind of talking about which happened to Japan as well as even happening in the United States after the financial crisis, which is, yeah, we saw a recovery in late 2009, 2010, but it was very weak. And it was a weak recovery and you kind of saw, I'm not stagnating, but it was very weak until about 2015, 2016. And that poses its own share of problems where, okay, unemployment's falling, but labor force participation is falling just because more and more people are getting discouraged. Baby boomers were retiring early and just sort of leaving the labor market. You saw these sort of unequal gains in income. Of course, if you were invested in the stock market, you did, you did relatively well during those years, but for other people, you saw this kind of stagnation in your earnings and kind of set back generational wise. There's a lot of statistics. I mean, it's the old saying lies, damn lies, and statistics going off to, all right, how are the generation, how are the millennials doing relative to their parents, the baby boomers, or how much wealth has been added since 2019? And a lot of people are, some studies have shown that it's like, oh, well, it's actually gone up. Now, aside from the recent kind of stock market boom, the main reason for that is because of home prices. Home prices have not appreciably gone down, which is good if you own a home. But of course, if you don't own a home, right, good luck buying at those prices and then good luck borrowing at those interest rates. Mortgage rates are north of 7% and home prices are incredibly high. I mean, that's just, that's a big issue. And so you're, of course, for a lot of younger people, you could be delaying when you're getting home, right? When you're expanding, of course, that means you could be delaying when you're building up your family, having children, building your reserve pool of workers, so to speak. And, you know, so that's one way it can kind of manifest itself. I mean, we're going to see what will happen. Will this be, all right, inflation is going to go above target and we're going to have to deal with the problems related to inflation, or is this going to be, you know, something like Japan or the United States, where there's going to be kind of this stagnation and growth is still kind of occurring, but people aren't really happy with it. You know, those are just, if we're looking at sort of from a more grimmer perspective, those are, I think, the two most likely ways. And yeah, you would just continue to see young people getting hurt, being, getting set back developmentally. This is in the United States, but I mean, reading about China, being a young worker in China right now is not an enviable position. The whole lying flat or letting it rot sort of mentality, I think that's what it's called there now, is just, it's really problematic because young people in China are getting totally disillusioned with the economy. And young people here are not yet, but that is something that could certainly be in store later in the decade. Well, then on top of this, there's all sorts of geopolitical issues that as we have seen play out kind of all sorts of interesting consequences. Actually, while we were recording, I saw that there was a, she has sent a message to the Biden administration that they are indeed planning to reunify with Taiwan, which is one of those conflict zones out there that there is a lot of bipartisan consensus on even while skepticism out there on Ukraine is picked up and while there is Middle Eastern situation being on there. So we have a, perhaps could have yet another active military geopolitical situation that we could add to the ever-growing deck of geopolitical threats out there as well. Again, I've seen a lot of, it's interesting to see, and I think this kind of speaks to some of the economic anxiety out there is that there are a lot of the defenders of the economic status quo. A lot of people that cheerlead when all of these new government statistic reports out there that brag about this great jobs report or look how much progress we're making in inflation if we don't include little things like food and energy, they dismiss all of the pessimism out there as just vibes. We're in a vibes recession, but I think going into the new year, the ramifications from COVID, the ramifications from inflation, the issues that young people in particular are having with the unique generational economic pressures that millennials and zoomers are facing. It seems that the mentality going into the new year is not quite the optimistic hopes that next year is going to be better, but a lot of sincere and broad angst and concerns about where we are going. But luckily, we've got such a wonderful political, substantive political campaign to look forward to, which I'm sure will do nothing but bolster the faith that the public at large has with the decision makers out there for all the challenges that DC will have facing it come out 2024. Yeah, the year has been total a bunch of surprises in terms of the foreign policy development. I mean, who would have known that getting involved in a land war against Russia would turn into a war of attrition? I mean, that's unprecedented in history. For anyone who of course knows history, that's not the case. Of course, that war is turning into a stalemate, real tragedy for the people of Ukraine and Russia and everyone involved. I mean, some of the casualties are just simply abominable. And that's kind of spreading. I mean, there's now there's Venezuela and Guyana. I mean, this is incredible. My old Grover Cleveland, I'm literally looking, I have a picture of Grover Cleveland right there. I mean, he had a very hawkish position on this, but I'm like, are we going back to that? Of course, we're not going to fight the British, but on that. Madison is rolling in his grave, the idea of Chinese military support in Venezuela. Yeah, I know. The Monroe Doctrine, right? It's the Monroe Doctrine, and now it also extends into Europe as well. Whereas sometimes I like the joke, it's the North American Treaty Organization. It's not really the North Atlantic. But yeah, we're seeing that. Of course, there's there's tragedy in the Middle East. And now we're seeing something happening in Taiwan. I, you know, Chinese Civil War, right? Like 1948, 49, you know, there's this whole Chianghai check. I read it, read it to all the history of doing a lot of research on the Marshall Plan right now. And so there's sort of fascinating stuff with China, because China was actually included in that. But yeah, we're seeing this. I do think that if we take the most mainstream position on the economy and other stuff, we could say, okay, Biden, aside from the vibes recession, something you mentioned, I think it's God, you mentioned that we could talk about. We could say, okay, he's doing okay in those areas, right? The unemployment rate is strong. And, you know, the economy is doing well. The foreign policy, you know, the foreign policy realm, that's something that could really kind of cascade into a bunch of problems, because not only was there the perceived debacle in Afghanistan, but you've got this war in Ukraine, Russia's heavily militarizing its economy because of all the dispute over that. And now Europe is faced with the prospect of having to pay for some of this stuff on its own. You've got the Middle East, you know, and that's become a big crisis issue because Israel is under a lot of criticism, at least with some of the policies they've been pursuing. And that, of course, leads to its usual controversies in the Middle East, potentially something in Venezuela. And now there's the Taiwan thing, right, which we'll see what that turns into. But, you know, the American empire, the unipolar world, right, I think as it's been described sometimes, is, it could be in this own turning point, and that in turn could lead to difficulties with the dollar, because the sanctions against Russia really haven't worked, and there's a large part of the world that is okay with not listening to us on foreign policy. So there are some of those anxieties. I certainly think those anxieties are higher in Europe, because they think, you know, Putin's going to invade, and I'm not really, that's a whole different conversation. I just think that's that's a lot of bluster. But, you know, that, yeah, this is the American world power is could be entering kind of this new phase, we have entered this new phase, we're not the only world power, right. And yeah, so foreign policy poses some of its own unique challenges in 2024. Yeah, I just know that 2024, it's not 1998, for those of us who remember the late 90s, where the most controversy you could come up with was Bill Clinton's impeachment trial over, you know, his sexual escapades in the oval office. And other than that, nobody really cared about anything. And certainly nothing like the geopolitical issues that we're looking at right now. And so those things could become critical, reach a critical stage at any time. It's just hard to say, does it boil over in 2024, or sometime in the future? America has been involved in essentially, and I said this to though, yesterday, as we were just talking about some issues related to foreign policy, is that the world of the late 1940s still exists largely this post World War Two consensus, where the US is accepted as the world leader. And that tells us a lot about the state of the dollar and the US economy. And you're in a holding pattern for all of that period until recently. And whereas in contrast, the world of, say, 1920, that's long gone. That's not something that's really very relevant to us right now. However, that post 1945 world does appear to be slipping away. And it will be impossible to predict exactly how that plays out in terms of the economy and the US's position in the world. And this does tend to filter down to just basic standard of living issues that many people will experience just on an everyday level, but it's really hard to predict what that means. But 2024 could be a significant year for changes in that. In terms of the economy, when it comes to the geopolitical developments, obviously oil is the biggest one. What would happen to oil and in gas? Something that is important to note though is that a lot of non-OPEC plus countries have been expanding, especially the United States, sort of ironic given the president's position on oil. But that production has increased significantly. So I'm not sure of how any new geopolitical conflict would lead to another spike in oil prices. It could happen. Something to keep an eye out for, I mean with Guyana. Guyana is a big producer of oil. There's potential for the Israel-Hamas conflict to spread out into wider oil markets with Iran that has not happened yet. But yeah, it will just be interesting to see in general how it will affect the overall mood. I don't know if that will happen in 2024 or later, but I mean it's certainly, we're seeing sort of, yeah, I don't know if it's the last gasp for another way of trying to reassert its dominance of the post-World War II era. This is the, you know, the baby boomers are now, you know, they grew up in that world and they're not going to try to continue it, so to speak. I think a lot of the, like a lot of the stuff with Russia I think is, well, it's the usual, it's just like the Cold War, right? Well, but that's a whole different conversation. But I mean the point is, is that, yeah, I agree with you guys completely. It's that foreign policy is sort of an X factor that can affect a lot of things, but still trying to see how things pan out on that front. Well, Ryan, it might not be 1998 in America anymore, but I did see that Disney is going to be releasing a new, more diverse X files. So at least we have that to look forward to. That's right, they bought Fox. Yeah. Yeah. Before we leave, any New Year's resolutions for the new year for either of you? Good, yeah. But before getting the New Year's resolution, I'll try to stall for time. I remember speaking of down, it's like the late 90s, the lack of news. Before 9-11 in the summer of 2001, I think all the focus was on like shark attacks at the beach, right? And that was in the news cycle. So could we only go back to the shark attacks, right? Like if that was the problem facing us, right? The deadly shark attacks, what are we supposed to do? If only. New Year's resolutions, that's, you know, I don't really, I just sort of, I have rolling resolutions. So I have, well, you know, I'd like to lose five pounds. I want to read more of this. I want to try and not get as angry or frustrated with the state of the world. But we'll see. I mean, I'm optimistic for myself for 2024, let's say. At least that's the perspective that you should have. I don't know. Do you guys have any New Year's resolutions? Well, I've got a kid in college, so my resolution is not to starve to death after paying tuition bills in this year. That's probably my biggest concern on a personal level, for sure. And that's not getting any cheaper. And so those sorts of, those costs are very much at the forefront of my thinking. And so, but I am glad I'm not as young as some of the 30 some things I talk to who just face much bigger challenges. And, but yeah, you've got to, if you're making resolutions this year, I guess, in economic terms, you just got to like, okay, I resolved to come up with ways to not completely blow all of my savings as prices of everything go up. Because I think that's just going to be the reality for a lot of people and not even us old timers, I think, are exempt. My resolution for 2024 is a new season of the Liberty vs. Power podcast, addressing cronyism part two for the New Year. Yeah, yeah, I would love to. I'm hoping the book you send it off to some people and want to see what they say. And yeah, that's another New Year's, I guess, resolution when I want to get cronies and publish and then we can, we can work on another season of Liberty vs. Power, right? So that's, that's the, that'll be the real bell weather. If cronies and gets published, no recession. If not, then you know, the economy takes, right? Okay, there you go. Yeah, well for a very stoic Patrick Newman for a starving Ryan McMacon. This is though Bishop for Radio Rothbard. It is always fun to talk with you too. Thank you to all of our listeners. This has been a great year for Radio Rothbard traffic. It has been going through the roof this year. If you haven't gotten your Radio Rothbard mug, it is a great post Christmas special, a purchase for yourself. I know all of you had it on your Christmas lift. If you did not get that, then you could still get that with a discount using the promo code Rothpod. Thank you for listening to Radio Rothbard throughout the year. We'll come back to you on 2024. Hey guys, this is though Bishop with Radio Rothbard and I hope you've enjoyed our episode with Dr. Patrick Newman. As mentioned, I'm looking forward to getting back to the Liberty vs. Power podcast, which was kind of a mini series we did talking about Dr. Newman's first book on cronyism. If you haven't yet watched that series or listened to that series, we're going to have the first episode as a special preview coming up here shortly. You can find the entire Liberty vs. Power series at mesis.org slash LVP as in Liberty vs. Power. Or you can find the entire series on YouTube at the Mises Media page. My own basic perspective on the history of man is to place central importance on the great conflict which is internally waged between liberty and power. A conflict by the way which was seen with crystal clarity by the American revolutionaries of the 18th century, Murray and Rothbard. This is the Liberty vs. Power podcast and the focus of this podcast is going to be to kind of expand on Rothbardian history. And for that we have Dr. Patrick Newman, one of the leading Rothbardian historians out there, the editor of Conceived in Liberty Volume 5 in the Progressive Era, and the author of the new release Cronyism, Liberty vs. Power in Early America. Patrick, what does the Liberty vs. Power framework sort of mean to you as an economic historian, looking back at issues like Cronyism and looking at different eras of history? What does it mean for you when you're applying this into new work? Yeah, so I'm someone very influenced by Murray Rothbard, very influenced by his overall outlook on history, his overarching narratives, etc. And so for me, studying Cronyism, the history of, you know, excuse me, not the history, just special interest policies, right, that benefit concentrated groups at the expense of the overall public, the Liberty vs. Power theory is very important when analyzing Cronyism in early American history, or just analyzing early American history in general, right? Because the Liberty vs. Power theory is that history is a clash between the forces of smaller government, right? This is Liberty and the forces of big government, big government and Cronyism, etc. There's the forces of power, right? So in early American history, this really does explain a lot of various legislation and the battles, the political and the economic battles that were going on, because you did have a mass movement dedicated to libertarian goals, fighting Cronyism, fighting for a smaller government. And this is America's libertarian heritage, it's its libertarian tradition. Murray Rothbard was always big on explaining this. That's why he spent five volumes writing a history of America during the colonial era, right? And so it's important to understand, because even though today there might not be as big of a mass movement in favor of liberty or politicians who are generally genuinely dedicated to it, it still has relevance for today. We can still see examples of it. But really, I think the key to understanding American history is understanding that American history is intertwined with libertarianism. And one of the things I think is kind of fun about this is that sometimes, even Rothbard's kind of criticized this by some, I think usually, unfair critics of kind of conspiracy theory sort of history, right? He kind of had the creature of Jekyll Island sort of analysis out there, where when Rothbard's writing about the origins of the Federal Reserve, for example, you know, he names names, he identifies the elites, the motivations, you know, at hand that was guiding this policy. You know, you shared with me this great article that was actually published in Reason in 1977, whereas Rothbard sort of defending kind of the conspiracy theory sort of lens of history, Murray described it as the conspiracy analyst and said that really what they're serving is as a praxeologist, that that is he believes that people act purposefully, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Hence, if a steel tariff is passed, he assumes the steel industry lobbied for it. If a public works project is created, he hypothesized that it was promoted by an alliance of construction firms and unions who enjoyed public works contracts and bureaucrats who expanded their jobs and incomes. It is the opponents of conspiracy analysis who professes to believe that all events, at least in government, are random and unplanned and that therefore people do not engage in purpose of choice and planning. You know, this is something that really comes out throughout a lot of Rothbard's histories and not only in the Conceived and Liberty series that obviously you helped publish the fifth volume of, but you know he's got you know really his 20th century analysis is so baked in so the conflicts between the Morgan family and the Rockefeller family, the influence of the Dallas brothers on international relations and the like, you know, it's something that I think is interesting where again this is something that can be dismissed by a certain type of scholar or even a libertarian as being a perhaps mean spirited or you know missing applying bad motives. But yet if we're actually looking at the way the state operates, there is these underlying agendas that are behind so much of what is done, you know, within the wheels of power with the facade being of you know general welfare or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. I was always that was one of the first Murray Rothbard articles I had read conspiracy theory of history, you know, revisited and it Rothbard goes through what he's really doing is he's applying Ludwig von Mises is his great mentor, his his his his thymology, his theory of thymology, right. So the science of praxeology is why, excuse me, praxeology is the science of studying the implications of human action, right. So I'm hungry. I want to eat a sandwich. So now we got to, you know, analyze the whole implications of that. Am I going to go buy a sandwich, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, thymology, which Mises really fleshed out the most in his one of his last great works, which is theory and history, is the study of understanding why humans acted. It's really kind of a fancy word for we might think of psychologizing. So trying to understand the motivations of someone. So why did I eat this, you know, why did I want a sandwich with something that I had happened to me earlier in my life or am I part of, you know, the sandwich lobby or you know, etc. And looking at understanding people's motivations, why they're making a choice. And this is especially relevant in the political arena, right, because a certain law is going to be passed. Okay, well, why was the law passed? A lot of economists will study historical, you know, history or various legislation, they're just going to look at the economic effects of that. And very often, they're not going to look at it correctly. But that's a whole different other, you know, aside, you know, the whole different other podcasts, basically. So a railroad that was created, you know, railroad legislation in the 1860s, an economic historian is going to just say, all right, well, what are the quantitative effects on GDP of this, creating the railroads, right? They're not going to look as much at why were the railroads passed? What were the motivations that this railroad legislation, creating these railroads was, you know, what was the underlying motivation of various individuals that requires the thymological perspective, which is looking at various, you know, primary sources. So documentation, understanding relevant actors' backgrounds, looking at, you know, their diaries or their correspondence, what are they trying to get out of something, et cetera. And that provides a much more richer overview or analysis of the particular type of legislation you're looking at. And this really shows that a lot of legislation is much more crony than we are led to believe, right? Because, you know, the much more developed, you know, based off of special interests trying to get something at the expense of the public. Because if you just look at what politician state is their motivation, it's always going to be in the public interest, right? If you want to push for some infrastructure bill, let's say you have to say, well, this is going to expand the American economy. This will do all sorts of wonderful things, et cetera. But what you don't see from that statement is, okay, what are the various special interests that have lobbied for this? You know, who are they? What were they trying to get, et cetera. So Murray Rothbard's whole historical outlook, his analysis of various, you know, the political process, everything from elections to the pushing for various legislation, it's heavily Misesian. Mises himself might have not done this because he mainly focused on theory. But it's really Rothbard's whole historical analysis is his application of Mises's theory in history. And it's funny, I think this kind of goes directly to some of the critiques out there at the Austrian school. Oh, you know, they try to pontificate from their armchairs, you know, all of the economic, you know, an analysis in the world on that sort of stuff. And that kind of gets directed to that core of dividing economic theory and the kind of narrow sense and then economic history, you know, weaving in sort of the more complex fabric of human reality, you know, recognizing that we can't do controlled variables and the like. You know, it very much is that sort of Misesian foundation, a George Pickering has a great sort of breakdown on the value of Rothbard's introduction to theory and history on that Rothbard wrote, which really kind of dives into the way that, you know, this Misesian understanding should be applied, obviously, it played a big role in Rothbard's career. But I think one of the things that has also kind of helps your Rothbard being such a fascinating historical thinker, on top of his political work, his, you know, his economic work or whatever, is that his background wasn't simply limited to the work of Mises in this regard, but also mentors like Joseph Dorfman, who was a great American economic historian in his own right. Can you touch on some of Dorfman's influence on Rothbard and the way that kind of played into kind of his understanding of American history? Yeah, so Joseph Dorfman was Rothbard's dissertation advisor. So Rothbard had gotten his PhD in economics at Columbia University. Back in the day when Rothbard was at Columbia in the mid 1940s, really around the end of World War II, tying in with the GI boom, Columbia University was one of the leading economics departments in the United States. It really was Harvard, Chicago and Columbia. So Rothbard was, you know, immersing himself with the many of the elite scholars of the era. Joseph Dorfman was a noted historian of economic thought. He was what was known as an institutionalist. It's the meaning has changed since Rothbard's time, but really institutionalists are very big on fact gathering and not being sort of anti theory, anti abstract theory, much more theory needs to be contingent on a particular historical episode and you need to first gather a bunch of information before you can then basically devise a, you know, some sort of explanatory hypothesis, etc. And so Joseph Dorfman had written a multi volume work, The Economic Mind in American Civilization. For those of you who can get a copy of this, I believe there are PDFs of it online through Mises.org. And you're interested in the material, I recommend that you read it, The Economic Mind in American Civilization. It's this, it's this great book I used a lot in my own book, Chronism. And Dorfman, I think really taught Rothbard to appreciate just sort of being very intensive with facts. So collecting a lot of information, showing the various connections an individual has, okay, who this this person talking about economic theory, you know, what were his connections that he owns stock in some various companies that influence his outlook. Joseph Dorfman did specialize in this so that that was apparent in his own, you know, The Economic Mind series. And Rothbard learned a lot from him. So you can see Dorfman's influence on Rothbard's The Panic of 1819. This was his dissertation. In the 1960s, Joseph Dorfman invited Rothbard. Rothbard was a attendee at a conference on American history. And Rothbard actually commented on Joseph Dorfman's own work, because Rothbard again, was very knowledgeable about the 1810s and the 1820s because of his dissertation. So Joseph Dorfman really had a major influence on Rothbard. That's why if you look at his History of Economic Thought, Rothbard's own series, the two volume series, an Austrian perspective on the history of economic thought, he dedicates the book, I believe, to Joseph Dorfman and Ludwig von Mises, both. And that just shows how much influence Dorfman had on Rothbard. One of the things I think is also interesting about Rothbard, I know it plays out in the progressive era with his analysis on sort of the third political system and things like that. It was Leonard Ligio, he's got an interesting article about Rothbard and Jacksonian banking that kind of ties into Rothbard's experience with Dorfman and the like. But Ligio mentions that Murray Rothbard was very deeply read in the new political history of first half of the 1900s on the ethno-religious approach to political culture. And I think that's interesting when we think about things in that liberty versus power narrative, that you have not only the political machinations of those in power, rewarding cronies, having their own motivations, but they're also dealing with kind of a different cultural trends within the people themselves, the public itself. And this often plays out in the way that different political parties, what ends up fueling their strength or leading to their downfall, that there are larger cultural dynamics at play that can often overthrow certain political regimes by going too far from where the public is. Can you speak a little bit to the dynamic of kind of the alter and thrown dynamic that also played a heavy role in sort of Rothbard's analysis of American history? Yeah. So firstly, the new political history, this was a very influential field in the 1970s trying to explain why people voted and basically argue that voting patterns could be determined by someone's ethno-religious background, whether or not they were German Lutheran or an Irish Catholic, et cetera. And this was something that had always fascinated Rothbard, particularly when understanding or trying to understand the 1800s in this party system of this very intense competition. Everyone was really interested. As Rothbard explained that I always love this in his own lectures, he said, you had people, everybody in their brothers, brother was writing some pamphlet on silver legislation or tariffs or whatever. And he's like, why were people so interested in economics back then? He said, I can't even get my own students to be interested in this. And you're a captive audience. So he's speaking to his students. He's basically saying, why aren't you guys interested? So I just love that part, especially. But yeah, this is important. Rothbard wanted to actually explain that ideology did matter. Ideology still does matter in a sense that at least it can return. People do vote based off of their ideological convictions. People do vote or they're more energized by more economic issues when they can somehow be tied into local more cultural issues. And we can even see this today, especially with COVID and mask mandates and everything where your average person really doesn't care about the national debt or monetary policy. That's something that's really hard to energize people about. They might care about if prices at the gasoline station are rising, but they do care about school closures, mask mandates. That stuff is easy to understand. That stuff really hits home. Oh, am I being forced to take a vaccine or not? That's a lot easier to understand than what's this spending bill going to do to interest rates in two years? Your average person doesn't really know that. So this is something that Rothbard had used in his own history, trying to analyze the ethnic background of various voting blocks. So he famously argued that really the Democratic Party, which was the libertarian party in the 1800s, was sustained by liturgical voters. So voters such as Irish Catholics and German Lutherans, as opposed to the political parties of power, such as the Whigs and Republicans that were sustained by pietists, these evangelicals who wanted to save the world so they could save themselves. That meant stamping out sin as well as passing various economic reforms. So that was a very big component of Murray Rothbard's historical outlook. The Alliance of Throne and Alter is also another crucial component of Rothbard's historical outlook. I really enjoy teaching this to my own students and explaining its relevance to today. The Alliance of Throne and Alter is basically this connection or the relationship between the leader of the government, such as the king, and a court intellectual, such as the priest. So back in the day, in order for the king to justify his various actions to the public, he would enlist priests and other sort of religious intellectuals to say, well, the king is divine. The king's words are directly from God. In order to save yourself, you have to listen to the king. You have to be conscripted by him. You have to pay taxes, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't have that overt religious emphasis anymore, but we still have the very similar principle where court intellectuals now, they might not be a priest, but they're going to be a political scientist or an economist who's going to say, well, you have to listen to our government, you have to listen to your government rulers because their policies are going to increase GDP, and it's going to make people better offered. It's going to reduce income inequality or it will save the environment or something like that. Or they might be a public health expert declaring themselves to be the embodiment of science. Exactly. They're saying, well, you have to listen to me. I am the one basically voice in the scientific discourse and et cetera. Why do they argue this? Why are so many intellectuals attached to the system? Well, it's very related to the point that Rothbard makes that I find very true. It's that, well, intellectuals are supportive of this in the same way that they're critical of capitalism because they know that capitalism won't really provide a demand for their services. So instead, they're going to justify state intervention because this state will turn around and scratch their back. The king would set aside tax money to build a new church for the priest. Nowadays, we employ various intellectuals, academics, economists, political scientists, historians, policy walks, whatever, at state universities at large endowed think tanks in the government and so on, right? So they're able to justify their own employment when they support various interventions. Yeah, I believe I know it's true a couple of years ago. I doubt it has gone down ever since, but I believe the largest source of grant money for economists was from the Federal Reserve System. Surprise, surprise, very few economists out there, depending on such money or is calling for ending the Fed or anything like that. And I think particularly right now, especially right now, given how vivid sort of the tentacles of the technocracy between the public health authorities between everything we've seen from the central bank system and the Fed and everything like that, I think this is one of the things that leads, let's call it kind of Rothbardian libertarianism, to be able to motivate people in a way that perhaps other forms of libertarianism doesn't. It seems that there's a lot of libertarians out there that tend to agree with the end result of a lot of government plans. They tend to believe that all in all, they might not always get things right, but the state more or less is a entity trying to work in the public interest where it very much is that Rothbardian perspective that no, the state is a bunch of thieves writ large, that they are ripping us off, and that they're doing so, that you're using all these side justifications to just simply defend ultimately what are self-serving policies. And then even if there is a degree to which some of these people generally believe that out giving more power to a Fauci or to the Fed might have over-larging underlying public policy benefits, that looking at the operations of the state from the cynical perspective is more often not going to lead you to more truthful outcomes than assuming good intentions. I remember when Dr. Hans Hermann Hoppe gave a talk at the 35th anniversary in New York City a couple years ago, he talked about Rothbard's interest in revisionist history and the importance that he placed on it was something that Rothbard's influence awoken him to the importance of looking back at the doctrinaire historical narrative and recognizing how a lot of the way that it is framed within traditional textbooks hides a lot of these underlying sins of the state. And again I think this goes directly to you know what ends up fueling a lot of that sort of heroic aspect of us against you know the regime that I think kind of goes a long way on why Rothbard continues to resonate so many decades after his passing. Yeah that's a very good point that you know Rothbard's perspective in many ways is unique or at least it's it's he emphasizes many points people don't they might agree with but they don't place as much weight on traditionally in a lot of free market economics you know textbooks in many cases even in Mises's work it's you assume well they got the best of intentions you assume what they're saying is is is true and then you really talk about unintended consequences so that well good intentions don't lead to good results so a politician is pushing for minimum wage because they think it will increase employment it help people who are poor off and then it will actually well turns out that it leads unemployment and it hurts those people etc etc so well you kind of go through this this cute little analysis and and and so on and well I think that explains part of it I think certainly some politicians or some people they do have good intentions or at least they think they're helping but for a lot of things even including the same politicians well they they also are pushing for their own special interest even if you take the minimum wage for example the actual origins of the minimum wage during the progressive era first on the state level and then in the 1910s and then on the federal level in the 1930s really at the state level it was designed to uh unemployed people it was designed to unemployed immigrants and women and children who are competing with the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant unions the male uh you know the the white men the the the the blue collar um working class so to speak who was pushing for various restrictions on immigration and so on in order to you know to to keep their own wages high the minimum wage is just another tool for that so you see well the cronyism is is is still there right the cronyism explains the minimum wage and in many ways it could probably even explain some of the minimum wage debates now when you look at who are the biggest proponents of minimum wage increases it's always unions even though curiously enough many of these unions are already paying their workers at prices at wages higher than the minimum wage they're they're they're advocating for so you say okay well why are unions that are paying their own members you know their their own members are earning 20 an hour with the company that you know the the union's working for why are they pushing to raise the minimum wage to 10 or 15 dollars well it comes from the fact that they know if you raise the wage of competition artificially you're going to make them less attractive for employers to hire so if you raise the price of teenagers you you make them unprofitable for a business to hire they're going to switch to slightly hired unionized members increasing the demand for those workers right so you go oh okay so maybe it isn't these you know these good intentions lead to good results it's kind of the bad intentions and this is something that Rothbard always emphasized and I think it's important to to look at because this is really understanding people's motivations okay this is really just engaging in that practice you know the the the science that mesis you know articulated thymology and really just applying it and when you do that you get a much richer understanding of the world unlike praxeology which is very logic based abstract you don't need empirical evidence this of course is very empirical you have to constantly be reading empirical information looking at motivations changing your hypotheses etc but when you when you do this enough and you get the right explanation you you hit on it it really does open open minds and that's why I think it's so important to explain cronyism explain mesis's thymology you know the thymology etc to as many people as we can and of course when we talk about this dynamic of you know large corporations taking advantage of the public you know this is something that's not necessarily exclusively libertarian in terms of its application right you know and I I know some of the conversations we've had off air you know that this liberty versus power framework that that Rothbard uses in history it's not necessarily unique to him one of I love reading gore of the dolls historical novels he kind of takes a similar sort of cynical approach with his narratives of empire highlighting you know kind of the general erosion of the republic into the state that we have now you know one of the great historical books about the jacksonian era is liberty and power by hurry watson reading this is clearly not you know some sort of laissez faire libertarian and in the truest sense there is this kind of constant dynamic amongst some some left economists as well I know I believe one of the big battles that joseph dorfman had that kind of inspired murray early on was a narrative that was going on amongst prominent award-winning economist trying to make the mod the the current wave of lbj style uh liberal in that sense politics trying to tie that to the jacksonian tradition where dorfman kind of you know a really highlighted an alternative view that was pretty compelling in terms of the underlying evidence there is a constant battle here and I think this is why Rothbard's history is something that we should be motivated by and why I'm glad people like yourself are building upon that tradition is that ultimately there is a cultural war aspect of this economic history uh ryanik makin last year had a great article about economics as a cultural issue that good history and good economics fundamentally it plays the role of illustrating for your average person again who is the group of people ripping you off and this is something that obviously the left has been able to to hijack in its own way I think of howards in people's history the united states right you know that's kind of a you know a a ideological history for a certain position Rothbard is sort of the counterbalance to that and so can can you kind of build off of you know the way that you see historical analysis playing out not only just having a better understanding of what really happened but in terms of perhaps some of these cultural war divides that we have going on in the country right now yeah so there's a lot of a lot of good stuff to discuss there um i the the liberty versus power theory or the the the i what i call a theory as i said it's not you know i i i think Rothbard but something that i try to argue my book as Rothbard did is that this was actually something that not only older historians spoke about most famously lord actin you could say but also contemporaries so bernard belin uh who was the dissertation advisor of gordon wood and other famous american historian both of them wrote on this and both of them discussed that you know americans back in the day they really did see things through this lens of liberty and power right they viewed liberty as the source of all sorts of inspiration and growth and flourishing while power was this cancerous tumor it was literally encroaching on everything it was corrupting and that's why you know that this has been you see in in depicting a central bank is this massive hydra with all sorts of tentacles right uh that's the jacksonians did because they still they too viewed things in terms of this liberty versus power framework it's important to know and this is something i try and do in in my book will show that yeah this theme this is people actually not only did hold this perspective but it actually is is a good explanation of why things proceeded or how things proceeded in the way they did because historians frequently try to look back on the past and sort of take maybe a current issue in the present and so well it actually has this long and storied history so you know obviously a libertarian such as myself is going to look back at america's libertarian tradition uh someone who such as arthur slesinger who is that historian you were mentioning uh who's trying to argue that back in the days of f dr the new deal well f dr is really in many ways uh he can be his heritage you know that this this interventionist democrat perspective fighting for the common man against the entrenched uh interest the the aristocracy uh well he's really you know uh andrew jackson is is similar to f dr right and so that took joseph dorfman to say well no andrew jackson and he was fighting the uh when he when he was fighting you know these large businesses or these entrenched interests it wasn't because of capitalism it was because they had various government privileges right and you see this with howards in uh and other historians nowadays so because uh critical race theory is very important and the big 1619 project and everything so you're going to look back into history and you're going to see well there were people who are arguing our perspective uh that you know race relations was this this big issue and and all sorts of other stuff and that's why america history is all doom gloom and boom so to speak and it's important to uh obviously you know respectfully engage the literature at least as respectfully as as we can and and try and show that well that's incorrect there's actually you know this is a much more uh convincing explanation of what happened because there are parallels with the modern day cultural wars etc because people are always trying to look back in into history and sort of in order to support their their own viewpoint so we do see you know the these themes if it's not trying to look back into oh you know trying to paint andrew jackson as a proto f dr guy now it's let's try and paint andrew jackson as some sort of genocidal maniac or whatever which is which is not true that just a distortion of the facts and it's important to really combat these uh and to produce good history because history is how history absolutely influences our perspective on the present day and i think as libertarians the preservation of american history is particularly important because i i know that murray was very proud of the american revolution you're discussing it as a people's war a battle for you know liberation and i think that's you know there are so few cultures that are you know really cultivated conceived in liberty so to speak and and that you know i i think that it is not a coincidence that a lot of you know the degree to which the current progressive left is trying to go after everyone right and the whole thing is that they kind of overplay their hand to a certain extent it's it's one thing to criticize andrew jackson based off of you know the treatment of of native americans or going after thomas jefferson for being a slave holder but but once uh you know blued von mesis and wilton freedman and james canan are all you know frosting racists that are trying to you know put in place a system of of you know continual oppression through an embrace of charter schools or whatever some of these modern new histories are you kind of see exactly you know if you're a hammer everything's a nail right and so if you're a leftist everything's a racist but but again though we're seeing an amplification of this battle within this entire new sort of era of of really left-wing conspiracy theories of the nancy mclean's of the quince lobotians of the 19 or 16 19 project and again i think it's interesting i think it is through a detriment that you know there are not more people doing the work that you have done uh our friend chris calton um with with his great podcast a few years ago uh taken a a a misesi and raff bardian lens at history um you know one of the things that i think has always led to the austrian tradition being so rich and vibrant was you know you know obviously back at in the universe per se of vienna you didn't you simply specialize in economists you know mesis studied law and he studied history he studied philosophy and the like that it is precisely the contributions that austrian thought provides not simply to economics narrowly but to political science um as ryan makin often argues to history to these other social disciplines that you need all of them to really defend any of them that's simply defending things on purely economic grounds isn't enough particularly when the other side is able to you know just kind of pitch their own very simplistic narrative we have to have our own pushback you know against that and that that's why i think again that this liberty versus power narrative is so important providing that's that that that important lens right when we think about marxism for example it's it's his class theory really is what has has i think kind of continued that tradition no matter the failings of socialism in a practical realm it's that that politics of envy that of you know the the monetary versus the bourgeoisie that has now been kind of remade over in so many different ways you know cultural marxism etc etc but this constant oppressor versus oppressor oppressor versus the oppressed dynamic that continues to give fuel to his cause it is precisely what ralph more does with his history that i think keeps this dynamic flame alive in this framework is it do you think that we need more historians more social scientists broadly to help kind of keep the austrian traditional life today there keep it thriving today oh yeah absolutely i think history philosophy political science very important i think we need more historians i think history in particular at the supporter summit i when the book was released cronies when released i explained yeah i gave at least my case for why why someone in 2021 would profit from reading a book that ends in 1849 right so what's the what could someone learn and i explain well history provides lots of case studies of cronyism or of the free market or the quasi free market working history can all is also interesting so it's it's easy to engage people economics can be very theoretically abstract okay then there's also you know again modern modern political battles on the other side you know the other side is waging their various political battles using history we've seen this with the 1619 project and other things so in order to influence someone on current events such as on inflation people are looking back on the 1970s then again you have someone paul krugman looking back oh the inflation after world war two etc so in order to basically you know illuminate our perspective on the present we have to look back at the past okay and then the last reason i gave is i think that i said you know there's light at the end of the tunnel you had reform movements in the past but all of that was trying to emphasize the importance of history why we need historians etc because this you know history is how we learn your average person they have an anti-capitalist pro-interventionist bias because of the the various history classes they've they've taken right or they've slowly been ingrained with you know oh of course we all need to wear face masks because if we didn't wear face masks and the government didn't take care of our health well we still have rats falling into you know being made into sausages and and you know people falling into vats that were turned into meat and all sorts of stuff like that so that's very important history is a crucial discipline that needs to be basically continued to defend this relates to something Rothbard had described as at various points in time as a science of liberty might be more accurately described as sciences sciences of liberty but it was his way of describing the overarching framework of libertarianism which not only included economic history also excuse me not only included economic theory but also included history economic history political science sociology etc and showing how all of these disciplines kind of reinforce each other and support this idea of a voluntary society that the free market provides the great the greatest human flourishing as opposed to the government etc so it's important to realize that it's a unified it's a unified front so to speak you have to be moving along on all the frontiers in order to really accomplish your objectives this is why the Journal of Libertarian Studies as one of the platforms for a lot of the research in this area you know recently we brought it back a few years ago with with the Libertarian Scholars Conference that we haven't held the last couple years because usually that's a New York thing and it hasn't been very friendly territory ever since early 2020 but I think you know there's a lot of value for for anyone out there interested in and you're looking at the kind of the non-economic parts of kind of Mises Institute content some of the old JLS articles has some really fascinating contributions by by all sorts of great names on history theory and the like and then get some some really interesting things out there so for the first season of liberty versus power we are going to be diving into your newest book cronyism liberty versus power in early America you know we're going to be taking it part by part we're going to allow you to kind of expand on some of the historical anecdotes that you've brought in and kind of highlight some of the kind of the important takeaways kind of have this provide a role of you know a cliff notes if you will but you know also just a platform for expanding upon what pages you have to you know couldn't get all in there I know in your early draft of the book it was much larger than the final product can you talk about just you know conclusion here you know just just a little bit about the work that you put into the book itself obviously you had a tremendous amount of familiarity with conceived and liberty and Rothbard's history of early America but as a last little tease can you just talk about a little bit about the production of cronyism and your process throughout writing it yeah so I'm an economist I don't believe in the labor theory of value but I can't tell you I worked hard on it but so that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good book but hopefully it might give an indicator yeah this this is something that I've spent the past two years working on I was asked to write a history of crony capitalism and I decided to focus initially on early American history before moving on to later historical periods which I'm currently researching right now and yeah this this book is it really is my attempt to try to can sort of flesh out that science of liberty that Rothbard had argued for sort of continue the story of conceived and liberty and basically try to explain it you know update it with new source material etc and this is something that I'm very happy about very proud of I'm I'm glad that various people have been reading it or been buying the book etc and this is really just shows that you know there are people who are interested in this material there are you know there is a natural audience for history and for a study of cronyism and this is one of the ways that I think is the best way of this is really the best way of convincing people the you know the benefits of the free market and libertarianism because this is something Rothbard had explained when he was researching American history and most people don't learn through economics they learn through case studies etc so I had written this this this big book of you know 550 pages over about two years but I was advised particularly by Chris Caughton who you mentioned to cut it down really just to squeeze out some extraneous facts or improve the writing and it really did improve the quality so it's in many ways it's a labor of love and I'm very happy to be going on this podcast and talking about it with you well and hopefully this is a nice little you know taste of what we're looking to bring to the table here with the liberty versus power podcast I'm very excited to be talking with you more going forward about not only your book but other fascinating little periods of American history providing perspectives that only a Rothbardian truly can with that being said this has been the inauguration of liberty versus power I hope you'll join us for future episodes and as always if you like this and want more content you can find articles podcasts lectures and more at Mises.org thank you very much