The American History Podcast, season three, episode two, an introduction to Austrian economics, part one.

Welcome to the American History podcast.

Hosted by Sean Worswick.

Thank you. hosted by Sean Worswick. All right, so welcome back.

All right, today, this episode and tomorrow's episodes are going to be interesting

ones, especially for a history podcast,

as I'm not going to talk history. Instead, this is going to be a lesson in basic Austrian economics.

Now, I will warn you this is a fairly long, but important couple of episodes.

As a matter of fact, when what started out is one episode turned into two.

So let's hurry up and get started.

I should also warn you that the Austrian School of Economics is far more than what I can cover in just two episodes.

So just think of this as a primer.

If you're interested in learning more, I'd suggest you check out mees.org or simply email me for some book recommendations.

The email is shan at the American History Podcast.com.

Now, the first thing I want to address is actually why I'm doing this.

I mean, why a set of episodes on economics?

Well, the 20th century economist Ludwig von Mises once wrote, quote,

history cannot be imagined without theory. The naive belief that, unprejudiced by any theory,

one can derive history directly from the sources, is quite untenable, end quote. Now, he went on to

say that explanations do not reveal themselves from the facts, so we need a theory to help us to understand the facts.

Further, Mises believed, and I agree with him, that economic theory was the tool that one

needed to understand economic history.

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