Free Daily Podcast Summary
The Bob Murphy Show: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Robert P. Murphy
Get key takeaways, quotes, and insights from The Bob Murphy Show in a 5-minute read. Delivered straight to your inbox.
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- Aug 24, 2019
The Myth of Good Government
[Originally published November, 2008.] One of the great and most persistent errors of classical liberals is to believe in "good government," a government that does "what it is supposed to do." There is nothing the state can do, and which society needs done, that cannot be done far better by the market. Another point that is just as telling: no state empowered to do what is supposedly necessary will restrain itself to those things. It will expand as much as public opinion will tolerate. Sometimes the point is easier to see when looking at foreign governments, such as the tragic case of China. The government is embarking on an explosive venture to dump $586 billion into "infrastructure" over two years. The reason is the classic Keynesian excuse: the spending is needed to stimulate investment. Never mind that this trick has never worked in all of human history. This is instead a grand plan to loot the private sector on behalf of the Communist Party, which will then spend the money bolstering its power. No country knows more about the failures of this type of central planning than China. Every form of collectivism has been tried out on these poor souls, and tens of millions lost their lives in the course of Mao's insane collectivist experiments. That this new plan is being enacted in the name of Lord Keynes rather than Karl Marx is irrelevant. The effects are the same: expand power and reduce liberty. China's recovery from communism is one of the most inspiring stories in the history of economic development. The country went from being a suffering and impoverished land of catastrophe to being modernized in just 15 years. The state shrunk in scope nearly by default as the private sector grew and grew. This wasn't the plan. It was the de facto result of the new tolerance of free economic activity. The state went into protective mode to keep its power, and did nothing to stop the swell of private enterprise. The result was glorious. Keep in mind this critical point: China's restoration as a civilized society came about not due to some central plan, but by its absence. The fact that the state did not intervene led to prosperity. Again, it wasn't a policy or a constitution or a law that made the difference. There was no switch from a communist-style government to a night-watchman state. Because the state abandoned its posts under public opposition and contempt, society could flourish. But the state never went away. It's just that its depredations have been spotty and unpredictable. Had history taken a better course, the central state would have melted away completely, and law would have devolved to the most local levels. Sadly for the Chinese, the state persisted in its old structure, even as the private sector grew and grew. The state still had its hand in the large industries such as steel and energy, and, of course, it controlled the banking sector. The government never became good (an impossibility). It was and is bad. It was just less bad than in the past, because it did less. But all states lie in wait for a crisis. The earthquake in the southwest provided one great excuse for intervention. There is no greater excuse for state expansion than an economic crisis—except perhaps war. Chinese officials can count on support from Western "experts" here, and the thoroughly disgusting US response to our own economic downturn has provided an awful model for the world. Think of it: the Communist Party in China is now citing the United States as the main reason for its plot to loot the private sector and bolster its own power at the expense of the country. So much for being a beacon of liberty in a dark world! Instead, the United States is helping to shut out the lights and bolster decrepit despotisms. This is surely one of the great ironies of the current political moment. Instead of teaching the world about liberty, the United States' newly empowered unitary executive is christening various forms of dictatorship. There can be no question that China's spending will not improve economic growth. It will instead extract $586 billion from the private sector and spend on political priorities. Never forget that no government has wealth of its own to spend. The money has to come from taxation, monetary inflation, or debt expansion that must be paid later. And government's spending choices will always be uneconomic relative to how society would use that wealth. That is to say, the money will be wasted. But won't the spending spur investment? It can create local boomlets, but they will be temporary. To the extent that the new spending causes a spending response from investors and consumers, this is more evidence of an uneconomic use of scarce resources. If the money is used to prop up failing companies, that's particularly bad since it is an attempt to override market realities, an attempt that is a
- Aug 23, 2019
Economic Nationalism Is a Philosophy of War
[This article is excerpted from "The Conflicts of Our Age" in chapter 24 of Human Action, the Scholar's Edition.] Popular opinion sees the source of the conflicts which bring about the civil wars and international wars of our age in the collision of "economic" interests inherent in the market economy. Civil war is the rebellion of the "exploited" masses against the "exploiting" classes. Foreign war is the revolt of the "have-not" nations against those nations who have appropriated to themselves an unfair share of the earth's natural resources and, with insatiable greed, want to snatch even more of this wealth destined for the use of all. He who in face of these facts speaks of the harmony of the rightly understood interests is either a moron or an infamous apologist of a manifestly unjust social order. No intelligent and honest man could fail to realize that there prevail today irreconcilable conflicts of material interests which can be settled only by recourse to arms. It is certainly true that our age is full of conflicts which generate war. However, these conflicts do not spring from the operation of the unhampered market society. It may be permissible to call them economic conflicts because they concern that sphere of human life which is, in common speech, known as the sphere of economic activities. But it is a serious blunder to infer from this appellation that the source of these conflicts are conditions which develop within the frame of a market society. It is not capitalism that produces them, but precisely the anticapitalistic policies designed to check the functioning of capitalism. They are an outgrowth of the various governments' interference with business, of trade and migration barriers and discrimination against foreign labor, foreign products, and foreign capital. None of these conflicts could have emerged in an unhampered market economy. Imagine a world in which everybody were free to live and work as entrepreneur or as employee where he wanted and how he chose, and ask which of these conflicts could still exist. Imagine a world in which the principle of private ownership of the means of production is fully realized, in which there are no institutions hindering the mobility of capital, labor, and commodities, in which the laws, the courts, and the administrative officers do not discriminate against any individual or group of individuals, whether native or alien. Imagine a state of affairs in which governments are devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual's life, health, and property against violent and fraudulent aggression. In such a world the frontiers are drawn on the maps, but they do not hinder anybody from the pursuit of what he thinks will make him more prosperous. No individual is interested in the expansion of the size of his nation's territory, as he cannot derive any gain from such an aggrandizement. Conquest does not pay and war becomes obsolete. In the ages preceding the rise of liberalism and the evolution of modern capitalism, people for the most part consumed only what could be produced out of raw materials available in their own neighborhood. The development of the international division of labor has radically altered this state of affairs. Food and raw materials imported from distant countries are articles of mass consumption. The most advanced European nations could do without these imports only at the price of a very considerable lowering of their standard of living. They must pay for the badly needed purchase of minerals, lumber, oil, cereals, fat, coffee, tea, cocoa, fruit, wool, and cotton by exporting manufactures, most of them processed out of imported raw materials. Their vital interests are hurt by the protectionist trade policies of the countries producing these primary products. Two hundred years ago it was of little concern to the Swedes or the Swiss whether or not a non-European country was efficient in utilizing its natural resources. But today economic backwardness in a foreign country, endowed by rich natural resources, hurts the interests of all those whose standard of living could be raised if a more appropriate mode of utilizing this natural wealth were adopted. The principle of each nation's unrestricted sovereignty is in a world of government interference with business a challenge to all other nations. The conflict between the have-nots and the haves is a real conflict. But it is present only in a world in which any sovereign government is free to hurt the interests of all peoples — its own included — by depriving the consumers of the advantages a better exploitation of this country's resources would give them. It is not sovereignty as such that makes for war but sovereignty of governments not entirely committed to the principles of the market economy. Liberalism did not and does not build its hopes upon
- Aug 12, 2019
Patrick Newman Cracks the Code to Publish a New Rothbard Manuscript
Economist Patrick Newman relays his adventurous tale of deciphering Murray Rothbard’s handwritten manuscript on early American history. Needless to say, Rothbard’s take is not what you learned in school. For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
- Aug 8, 2019
Bob Explains the Highlights of His New QJAE Article on Fractional Reserve Banking
Bob Murphy explains some of the most important points in his new QJAE article on the fractional reserve banking debate. Bob shows why Mises thought any issuance of fiduciary media caused the boom-bust cycle, and he points out a major flaw in George Selgin’s defense of fractional reserve banking. For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
- Aug 6, 2019
Economist Ben Powell Reports on His Worldwide Tour of Socialist Countries
Ben Powell, head of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech, discusses his newly-released book Socialism Sucks (co-authored with Robert Lawson). Powell and Lawson toured countries around the world to observe firsthand life under ACTUAL socialism—in places like North Korea and Venezuela—versus places that merely have large welfare states (like Sweden). They concluded that, well, socialism sucks. For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
- Jul 18, 2019
Michel Accad, MD, Leads Bob on a Critical Analysis of Kenneth Arrow’s Healthcare Paper
Michel Accad practices cardiology and general internal medicine in San Francisco, and holds a part-time clinical faculty appointment at the University of California San Francisco. This episode continues the discussion that Bob had with Dr. Michel Accad back in Episode 43. There, Bob reviewed the development of concepts like “efficiency” and “market failure,” so that now he and Michel (in the current episode) could understand the pioneering 1963 article from Kenneth Arrow on healthcare economics. Specifically, Arrow outlines reasons that (in his mind) a free market in healthcare and health insurance won’t work very well. For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
- Jul 10, 2019
Steve Patterson Challenges Rothbardians: Economic Theory is More Empirical Than You Think
Steve Patterson—host of “Patterson in Pursuit”—talks to Bob about one of his recent essays, in which Patterson challenges the standard Misesian/Rothbardian view of economics. Specifically, Patterson claims that you can’t get very far with pure a priori reasoning—even pretty basic economic laws rely on empirical assumptions. For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
- Jul 2, 2019
Michel Accad, MD, Leads Bob on a Discussion of "Efficiency" and "Market Failure" as Used in Health Economics
Michel Accad practices cardiology and general internal medicine in San Francisco, and holds a part-time clinical faculty appointment at the University of California San Francisco. This episode reproduces a discussion Bob had on Michel’s podcast, where they discussed the development of “welfare economics” in mainstream theory, in preparation for their subsequent discussion of Kenneth Arrow’s famous paper critiquing free-market healthcare delivery. For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Get The Bob Murphy Show summaries in your inbox
Free AI-powered daily recaps. Key takeaways, quotes, and mentions — in a 5-minute read.
Get Free Summaries →Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
You Might Also Like
Listeners also like.
Bob Murphy Show
Robert Murphy
Interviews
Contra Krugman
Bob Murphy and Tom Woods
The Human Action Podcast
Mises Institute
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
The Human Action Podcast
Mises Institute
Enemy of the State: Murray Rothbard
Enemy of the State
Pirate Money
Kevin D. Freeman
Mises Audio Books Podcast
Mises.org
Other Life
Justin Murphy
Macro Musings with David Beckworth
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
About The Bob Murphy Show
The Bob Murphy Show features in-depth interviews and solo analysis by Bob Murphy. Much of the content relates to economics in the tradition of the Austrian School, as well as libertarian political theory, but the show covers a broad range of topics.To learn more, visit BobMurphyShow.com
Customized Recaps
AI-powered recaps with compact key takeaways, quotes, and insights.
Straight to Your Inbox
Get key takeaways from The Bob Murphy Show in a 5-minute read.
Save Hours Every Week
Stay current on your favorite podcasts without falling behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Podzilla's The Bob Murphy Show daily summary?
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of The Bob Murphy Show as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
How does the The Bob Murphy Show podcast summary work?
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official The Bob Murphy Show product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by Robert P. Murphy.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts. Upgrade to Pro for 15, or Premium for 50. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
How often does The Bob Murphy Show release new episodes?
The Bob Murphy Show publishes every few days. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does The Bob Murphy Show cover?
The Bob Murphy Show covers topics including News, Commentary. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting The Bob Murphy Show summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.