The Tom Woods Show, episode 668.

Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion.

Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show.

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Hi, everybody, Tom Woods here. We're talking to David R. Henderson today, and I got the idea for this episode from an earlier episode I did where David Henderson's name came up, and I read a contribution he made to a book, and I thought, you know what? We've got to have him back on because he's been doing some interesting work on the subject of foreign policy and what an economist can bring to bear in the discussion.

What are some economic concepts that can help us to understand what the correct foreign policy

ought to be? And of course, David Henderson is a non-interventionist, so an even more interesting

discussion. David Henderson is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution,

and he is also a professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

You can pay him a visit at David R. Henderson.com. David, welcome back to the show.

Thanks, Tom. I almost, you know, I almost titled this episode, economists are good for something after all.

But then I didn't, you know, I thought that would be taken as an insult.

I think that's correct.

But, you know, it's interesting to hear how an economist can take some ideas that are familiar

within economics and apply them in other areas, and in this case, foreign policy.

I want to start off actually not with the broad question of non-interventionism and where

economic analysis can help us understand things better.

I want to start with a specific topic that you wrote about

some years ago, and that has to do with why it's not necessary to wage a war for oil. There have been,

...