We Built America on the Back of Black Slavery

In this episode I speak with Rachel Ferguson about her book Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America, co-authored with Marcus Witcher. The book address issues of social justice, exclusion, opportunity, race and discrimination, classical liberalism, and the economic history of African Americans since the civil war.

Themes we discuss include

• Racism and exclusion from justice, property, and rule of law

• Classical Liberalism

• Property Rights

• Freedom of Contract

• Education

• History of Injustices post Civil War

• Convict Leasing

• Lynching

• Jim Crow

• Progressivism

• Eugenics

• Sterilization

• Minimum Wage and its racist and eugenic underpinnings

• Urban Renewal

• Highways, transportation and the breakdown of African American and ethnic communities

• Eminent Domain

• African American towns and civil society

• 1619 Project and its errors

• Family and the Sexual Revolution

• Contraception

• Entrepreneurship

• Civil Society

• Alexis de Tocqueville

• Applied economics

• Criminal Justice reform

• Black Churches as a central part of community

• Decentralization, Associational Life, and Welfare before the Welfare State

We discuss a number of writers including

• Fredrick Douglass

• Zora Neale Hurston

• Booker T. Washington

• Malcom X

• Friedrich Hayek

• Anthony Bradley

Biography

Rachel Ferguson, Ph.D. is an economic philosopher and Director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia University, Chicago. She has published in Discourse, The Journal of Markets and Morality, and the Library of Economics and Liberty. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy from St. Louis University. She is actively involved in community building and empowering marginalized entrepreneurs through LOVEtheLOU and Gateway to Flourishing

https://www.rachelfergusononline.com/

Resources

We mention a lot of books during the podcast. See below for links. Other things discussed include:

Rachel Ferguson Essay: Let’s do Philanthropy that Actually Works

Robert Woodson and the Woodson Center

Podcast with Anthony Bradley on Over-criminalization

MMM on Eugenics is Back

Benefits Cliffs

Russell Hittinger on Technology and Contraception

Podcast with Mary Eberstadt on the Sexual Revolution

Poverty, Inc.