Oct 28, 2022
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
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/
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
Russell Hittinger on Technology and Contraception