Radio host Mark Levin, who positions himself as a conservative, went on a tear last week, in particular going after Murray Rothbard (whose criticisms of Ronald Reagan Levin cannot abide). I’ve responded:

NPR solicited a 500-word column from me on the new document from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Hard to say much in 500 words, but I did my best.

With Peter Schiff testifying before Congress yesterday I had another chance to fill in as host of the Peter Schiff Show. My guests were Bob Murphy and Jeff Tucker; video below, and audio file here.

Before speaking at West Liberty University in West Virginia not long ago, I appeared on a local financial program and had a chance to talk about the significance of the Austrian School, particularly in light of our present situation. Fairly basic stuff for readers of this blog, I know, but here it is all the same:

Here’s the raw footage of an interview that producer Jimmy Morrison did of Professor Roger Garrison on the economic crisis we continue to endure. Portions of this and other interviews will be used in a planned documentary based on Meltdown, my own book on the subject.

On the last night of this year’s Mises University program, after the official proceedings were over, students and faculty were treated to a performance by the very Mises-friendly band Fly by Radio just down the street. Even better, they called our own Robert P. Murphy onto the stage to sing Sweet Caroline. (Notice his shout-out at the beginning to Ben Bernanke.)

I have a relatively new YouTube channel and have begun posting videos semi-regularly. I did two this week; here’s one of them. This is the only time I’ve spoken in any detail about the war on drugs.

I’ll be speaking at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, tomorrow night, tying together lots of topics: the coming fiscal collapse, business cycles, the Fed, the Great Depression, and other areas of interest to Austrians. Details here.

As many readers doubtless already know, David Nolan, a founder of the Libertarian Party, died yesterday in Tucson, Arizona. He was on the side of the angels, so to speak, on the issues so many of us care about. He was also a model of civility: he could disagree with others without purging or smearing them — a vanishing quality in our world. I’ve been pleased to see so many tributes (particularly on Facebook) by young people who were inspired by him. Here he is on the Lew Rockwell Show in December 2008. Rest in peace.

Hope you can join the Mises Institute in Colorado Springs on Saturday for a one-day seminar called “The Delusion of Good Government.” Speakers include Doug French, John Cochran, Jeff Tucker, Yuri Maltsev, and me. Impossible for this not to be a nice time, and I can attest from having been there last year that the venue is wonderful. (I’ll be coming from a presentation the previous day at the annual conference of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which is apparently prepared to entertain some radical proposals for dealing with the health-care law.) Other Mises Circle events are slated for other states in the coming 12 months.

(Cross-posted from LRC)

By all means you should become a fan of the Mises Institute on Facebook. But you should also join a brand new group, a tribute to Jeff Riggenbach’s Voice. (If only I weren’t at the friend limit, and thus barred from adding any more pages.) Jeff is the voice behind Human Action and other Mises.org articles and books, and has been doing excellent work with his podcast The Libertarian Tradition. When you hear him, you’ll understand this tribute page.

As Lew Rockwell mentions in his article today, the wonderful new Instituto Mises Brasil sponsored the first-ever conference on Austrian economics this week. Hundreds were there, with most of them under 25. It was a thrill and an honor to speak and take part.

I also had a chance to speak at the huge Forum da Liberdade, for which an incredible 5500 attendees registered. This year’s Forum, as Lew mentions in his article, centered around Mises’ book Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, known in Portuguese as Six Lessons. I covered inflation, on a panel with Stephen Kanitz and Ricardo Lopez Murphy. (Kanitz misstated the meaning of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and then criticized supporters of the free market in the process of attacking his own misstatement of Smith; I gently corrected him during the question period.) The video will be available in the near future.

The conference hall at the Forum was truly a sight to see: quotations from Mises on walls, on banners, hanging from the ceiling — everywhere.

Helio Beltrao, the founder of Mises Brazil, was given an award for his work for liberty. His acceptance speech, which I heard via simultaneous translation, was extraordinary. And I was delighted to hear him mention Lew Rockwell’s indispensable role in the ongoing Austrian revival.

We met so many bright and well-read Austrians while there. Very, very impressive. The days when every Austrian economist in the world personally knew every other one are long over, to say the least. Some kind of watershed has been reached for sure.

This weekend Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Tom DiLorenzo and I will be speaking at the Campaign for Liberty’s Regional Conference in Atlanta. It begins Friday night with an event that is free and open to the public; Ron Paul and I are the featured speakers. The next day Lew and Tom will speak, and the three of us will appear on a panel to discuss the economy, central banking, etc. Should be fun. It all takes place at the Sheraton Atlanta.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, October 20) at an event in Hartford sponsored by the University of Connecticut School of Business I’ll be speaking alongside, if not quite debating, an executive from a major insurance company on the subject of “too big to fail,” and secondarily on the government’s response to (and responsibility for) the financial crisis in general. It’s not a debate, but each of us will speak for about 40 minutes, followed by audience questions. Details here.

Here’s my most in-depth discussion of the Depression of 1920, which reversed itself in the face of dramatic government budget cuts and a Federal Reserve that did not use its money creation powers. The article is a more formal version of my presentation at the Mises Circle in Colorado Springs back in April:

Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post (free registration required) that “the problem with contemporary economics, at least with the purer strain of free-market economics associated with the University of Chicago, is not simply that it failed to predict the near-collapse of the world financial system last year. The problem is that it believed such a collapse could not happen, that all risk could be quantified by mathematical models and that these quantifications could help us correctly price just about everything.” Harold, I think I know an even purer strain, and one that did predict these problems, but I’ll leave you to your Orwellian exercise.

Then this: “…there really was no need to study such things as bubbles, which only a handful of skeptics and hopelessly retro Keynesians even considered possible. Under mainstream economic theory, which held that everything was correctly priced, bubbles simply couldn’t exist.” Which “handful of skeptics” would that be, Harry?

“The one economist who has emerged from the current troubles with his reputation not only intact but enhanced is, of course, Keynes.” Well, “of course”!

(Thanks to Timothy Geraghty.)

We all encounter more than our share of foolish blog posts. Most of the time you simply have to let them be. You could spend the rest of your life correcting drones and automatons who will never have an original or unconventional thought no matter how much you prod them. Their seventh-grade teacher, who was also the track coach, taught them what they know, and they’re sticking to it.

Once in a while, though, for your own sake and for the sake of readers who suspect the post is all wrong but aren’t quite sure why, you let loose with a full-blown response. And that’s what I’m doing here in reaction to a blog entry called “Peter Schiff: Medicare Recipients Are Lazy People Who Refuse to Pay for Their Own Health Care.”

This is longer than my usual pieces, but I hope I am not trying the reader’s patience too much. In block quotes are the words of a blog author who identifies himself, interestingly enough, simply as “Che.”FULL ARTICLE

Lew Rockwell reports that Ron Paul’s books The Revolution: A Manifesto and End the Fed will be translated into Chinese. My own book Meltdown has just been published in Japan (here’s the Amazon Japan link) and is being translated into Chinese and Korean (as well as French and Czech).

I’m speaking at the University of Cincinnati tomorrow night at 7:00pm in Zimmer Hall on the Fed, the economic mess, and our standard themes. Details here. I’ll be in several other places over the next couple of months.

If you’re in the San Francisco area, don’t forget the Mises Institute’s event there this Saturday. Lots more of those to come, too.

Below is my opening statement at a debate earlier this month in Las Vegas on abolishing the Federal Reserve. Gene Epstein (of Barron’s) and I debated John Fund and Warren Coats. The whole debate is available as a series of YouTubes or as a single whole via C-SPAN (give it a minute to load). It airs on C-SPAN2 again tomorrow (Sunday) at 9:00am ET. (Here’s the blog post I refer to at one point.)