Black Liberation Through the Marketplace (with Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher)

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0:00:08.1 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Rachel S. Ferguson, an economic philosopher at Concordia University, Chicago, and Director of the Free Enterprise Center there, and Marcus N. Witcher, an Assistant Professor of History at Huntington College in Montgomery, Alabama. Together, they are authors of the new book, Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America. Welcome to Free Thoughts.

0:00:32.1 Rachel Ferguson: Thanks for having us.

0:00:33.1 Marcus Witcher: Thanks for having us.

0:00:35.4 Trevor Burrus: And clearly, the title is provocative, and I think for many today, the most provocative words are there Black liberation, especially in these times, the idea that Blacks have been, or can be liberated by the market, or that they’ve achieved liberation at all. So what do you mean in the general sense of Black liberation?

0:01:00.1 Rachel Ferguson: Well, and I’m certainly playing with words a little bit there, because I know that liberation has maybe Left coding as a word where the term marketplace is perhaps Right coding or a Libertarian coding or something. And so part of it was on purpose, to show that, and bring the anti-​tribal nature of the project forward right away, but it’s also the fact that when you look around globally, you are seeing real liberation through the marketplace happening all over the World, people going from being in a totally economically vulnerable position, maybe picking rice or something, and a few generations down, having choices, being able to go to college, and sending your children to school, and having antibiotics. And so we know as classical Liberals, how liberatory the market can be, and so we wanted to go back and look at the situation of Black Americans and say, “Hey, wait a second, so much of this oppression that they’ve experienced is their exclusion from the liberatory effects of the market.” And of course, today, many Black Americans are really thriving economically, doing incredibly well, but of course, we maintain concern for people who have remained shut out in certain ways.

0:02:22.5 Trevor Burrus: You said anti-​tribal, which you mentioned in the beginning of the book. What do you mean by anti-​tribal?

0:02:28.0 Rachel Ferguson: Well, I think that there’s no denying that we’re in a kind of toxic or poisonous political moment, people seem to be in what I call, reaction mode, I used to say, as I was writing the book, I woke up every day with the same thought, don’t react. That was my mantra. And so the idea of unbundling the different things that we tend to put together into political platforms, for instance, and being able to take issues one at a time, because it can be really tough to take a position that doesn’t fit with your socio-​cultural group, and to push back on them a little bit, but one wonderful thing about being a classical Liberal all my life is that I’ve never fit in well with any socio-​political group, and so around Progressives, I might think that our national spending is out of control and around Conservatives I might think we need to end the drug war, and so I’ve never fit in and Marcus has never fit in in that regard. And so bringing that ability to sort of be non-​tribal to this very hot topic of race, which is causing a lot of reactionarism, seemed to… I felt like we kinda needed a shot in the arm in that direction.

0:03:42.6 Marcus Witcher: Yeah. One of the key aspects of the book, and one of the things that I think makes it unique is the fact that, we say, Listen, the Left has some really good ideas. The Right has some really good ideas. Both sides are right on some issues, it’s a matter of parsing the prescriptions or maybe Progressives point out the problems, but the prescriptions are bad, and are only going to lead to sort of increased poverty, they won’t actually solve the problems, maybe Conservatives have certain truths that we can take to bear as well, and so we try to bring them together to offer readers, it’s not just sort of a bash on Progressives and a bash on Conservatives, we try to take the best from both of those traditions, and see it through this classical and Liberal lens, to offer as a, if you will, a third way of looking at the issue.

0:04:27.9 Trevor Burrus: And the use of the marketplace is interesting, ’cause you address this early on, there are many people, many people in the academy, especially, who believe that whatever capitalism is, it’s not going to be an engine for racial justice, at the minimum, and not only that, slavery itself is part of the dirty history of capitalism, and part of the kind of the, Baptise book, in particular, I’m thinking of, that slavery and capitalism were, if not, dependant on each other, they at least moved hand in hand, so how do you address that claim, and why did you think it was important to address that claim?

0:05:05.9 Rachel Ferguson: Yeah, I think the ideas of the new historians of capitalism are becoming more and more popular, obviously, immensely through the 1619 project in the New York Times in particular, and so we wanted immediately, of course, if we’re gonna defend a classical Liberal perspective at all, we need to show that it has this Abolitionist history, and the idea that right out of the gate, and not only morally, but also economically, people like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and others objected to slavery, on both grounds, exploiting other people is not a good way to get rich, it can be a good way for a few people to get rich, I should put it that way, it’s sort of like piracy. It could be a good way for a few people to get rich, but it’s not a good way for a whole economy to get richer, and to experience the kind of great enrichment that we see through innovation, because you’re just taking a group and you’re excluding them and all of their great ideas and the possibilities of trading with them, and we think that the new historians of capitalism are very sloppy with the term capitalism, the term itself is confusing anyway, because you have cronyism, which can sometimes be seen as part and parcel of capitalism, or not, and so we don’t use the term capitalism actually, we use the term free markets, and so we did think we had to kind of address that head on, so we do that right at the beginning of the book, in Chapter 2.

0:06:24.0 Marcus Witcher: Yeah, I think that one of my major criticisms as a historian is that the ideas, the liberatory ideas that are ingrained within the Declaration of Independence are a product of Liberalism, there are a product of enlightenment Liberalism and market Liberalism as it emerged in the 19th century was amazingly Liberal… Provided liberation for many, many, many people, lifted people out of poverty, and we see those ideas that were ingrained within the Declaration of Independence and within the constitution, the Bill of Rights, et cetera, being slowly extended to other groups of people over the course of the 19th century and the 20th century. The great failing was not of market Liberalism, the great failing was not extending market Liberalism and the protection of just rule of law to all Americans. And so I find the new historians of capitalism and their criticism of capitalists, and they’re really criticizing… They conflate capitalism with the markets, but markets have existed since, well, I would argue, as someone who teaches World Civ, from the beginning of time, markets are natural, chucking and bartering and what not, capitalism is something unique that emerged in late 18th, early 19th century in the Netherlands and Britain, and they don’t really, I don’t think delve into that nuance at all.

0:07:36.0 Trevor Burrus: And it’s interesting, I like your analogy, Rachel, the piracy, because there seems to be a weird inability to understand that, yes, some people can get rich, I was thinking about all these other things that I would consider not capitalism, not markets, like the American Bar Association might enrich a bunch of people at the expense of bad legal… Bad legal… Not meeting legal need and a bunch of people who are artificially wealthy, and so you do a good job of working through, “Well, what were the trade-​offs, and what actually… Where was the slave economy by the war?” I think that’s an important thing, like that they were defending slavery as a positive good and they were not growing or adjusting or innovating or doing almost anything because of the oppression of the Black Americans of the time, correct?

0:08:27.3 Rachel Ferguson: Yeah, so this can be a little confusing because the Southern economy was pretty big, like relatively in the World, it was a pretty big economy. Planters could be quite wealthy, they weren’t any wealthier than Northern industrialists, but they could be as wealthy as them. And so what you have to look at is more of the layout of the wealth, and so what we see as a good marker of a free market economy is a large middle class, so you may have a few rich people, and you may have a few poor people, but you wanna have a really big middle class. What you see in the South, is no middle class. So you have a few wealthy families, and very poor Whites, and then deeply poor enslaved Black people, and you see really weird behavior, like 100 years after people are using the steam engine, they’re handing buckets of water down a line because, you can use the slave labor, you have that, so you might as well use it. So it ends up really not driving normal kinds of innovation and investment and infrastructure in such a way that, when the war is over, that the South is desperately to catch up, in that regard. And Frederick Douglass expresses real surprise at meeting regular White people in the North, because he thought of people who weren’t owners as poor, and then he would meet regular White workers and be like, “They’re doing pretty good.” He was sort of amazed when he got up North at just how well off regular workers were.

0:10:00.0 Trevor Burrus: After the war, it’s of course a very, very… We’ll get into all the difficulties of Reconstruction South, but it did seem clear to many people, including the Freedmen’s Bureau and people in Washington to some extent, that what was really needed for the freemen, freedmen was, property rights, the ability to contract your labor, the ability to defend yourself from violence, the kind of things that were being systematically denied, and of course, slavery itself is the systematic denial of the right to contract and the right to own the products of your labor. How was the struggle… Just taking one of the beginning chapters for property rights, how did that get sort of fought out and how did it go for the freedmen overall in the Reconstruction of the South?

0:10:42.5 Rachel Ferguson: Well, I’ll start and Marcus can follow, but I cannot more highly recommend the book, Competition and Coercion by Robert Higgs, it’s sort of beloved in the classical Liberal community, but not well-​known outside of it, really, really good work, and what he shows is that, freedmen desperately wanted farms, there was a real desire for property, for land, a sense of the dignity that would come with ownership, but unfortunately, in many cases, they could not maintain property rights, of course, they were never compensated for all of the stolen labor, there were no 40 acres that didn’t end up coming to fruition, and so what you end up with is the sharecropping system, the sharecropping system is not ideal, but because freedmen had the ability to move, because they had the threat power of, I can move from this farm to that farm, or I can move from the Lower South house to the Upper South, they were able to bid up their shares, and so you do see actually pretty impressive gains, Black America… The Black American economy triples the speed that it grows at when compared to the White American economy, they’re starting from a very low point.

0:11:58.4 Rachel Ferguson: So that doesn’t mean that you’re rich by 1900, but it does mean that you’ve got a little bit of extra income enough to have some things beyond necessity and maybe be able to take a vacation every now and then. So a little bit of extra income. But it really is a huge… A huge leap forward, and one of the things that Higgs shows, which I think is so powerful, is the way that the White farmers, the planters, tried to collude with one another, and even put it in the newspaper, “Let’s all just agree that we’re not gonna let anybody move from farm to farm because they’re bidding us against each other, and they’re bidding up their shares,” and of course, all collusions, like all cartels, they were totally unstable and they couldn’t make them work, but you just saw how hard they tried to use that kind of mechanism in order to stop wages from going up.

0:12:53.5 Marcus Witcher: Yeah, and it’s really, really incredible that during this time period of Reconstruction, and of course the blowback against sort of Radical Reconstruction and trying to empower African Americans by the Freedmen’s Bureau, et cetera, that you see massive, massive literacy gains among Black… Among the Black community, among Black Americans, and you see other things that I think sometimes we sort of forget about is this, the extension of contracts, not only in the form of property, but also in the form of marriage contracts, recognition of things like that, and so the dignity of those people was also enhanced significantly, as Rachel said, sharecropping was not an ideal system, and there are definitely instances where people were exploited and it was pretty, pretty bad, but on the whole, I think Higgs is pretty convincing, that the freedom to move sort of enabled this massive increase over the course of those 30 or 40 years, even in a not ideal system.

0:13:48.2 Trevor Burrus: Seems like a good time to get into Gary Becker and the economics of discrimination, which many Libertarians are familiar with the idea that being a racist, let’s say, employer of some sort, and not wanting to employ someone because of your racism even though they’re qualified for the job, can hurt your business. The basic argument of Gary Becker, but it’s also kind of… It seems like something we should be uneasy with, essentially we’re saying that a person can price their labor lower in order to essentially compensate the owner, the employer, for their racism, because someone says, “Well, how much is your racism worth to you?” And maybe it’s worth $4 an hour to a racist person in the South or something, that would be a lot at the time, but it’s worth something, and so if you’re allowed to pay them less, then you might be willing to employ someone that you’re racist against, should we feel okay with this argument, is… Do we want them to… People have to essentially pay their employers for being racist, or should we just more demand that no one be racist at all, and not be allowed to charge anyone less, whatsoever?

0:14:58.0 Rachel Ferguson: Yeah, that’s a really… Actually, a nice way of objecting to the view of Becker, I think that we need to take a couple of things into account. One, actually employers, and we see this in the work of Paul Moreno on Blacks and Unions, employers are actually pretty indifferent to people’s race, they’re happy to hire whoever is the best deal, because that’s the incentive structure that they’re under, but they’re often dealing with the racism of their workers as well as their customers, so they’re dealing with employees, for instance, who are saying, “I will go on strike if you hire Black workers.” And so, just to be fair to employers there, there’s an organic issue of real racism in… Person-​to-​person racism in the society that we have to get over somehow, and so the argument, I think can be defended in this way, by saying, because this… We are in the non-​ideal situation of having racism, of course, the ideal would be to not have any, but since we have it, then allowing people to get on to the bottom rung of the economic ladder, causes us to have more organic economic relationships that can then over time, kind of deal with racism, and I think people underestimate how much of that was going on, so I was really struck when I read the book The Color Of Law, by Richard Rothstein, how many neighborhoods were fairly integrated, you have a Black Street and Polish Street and an Irish Street.

0:16:26.6 Rachel Ferguson: And so they may not live right next door, but workers were living near where they worked, and they were fairly close together, and it actually took the imposition of the federal government, with things like Federal Housing Administration redlining, the highway system, the Urban Renewal programs, those things to actually artificially separate people who were already organically mixing. And so there really is a question of how do you organically get out of historic racism as opposed to something inorganic, which actually made it much much worse, and then you have to do something as drastic as the Anti-​Discrimination Act, because you’ve painted yourself into a corner, at that point, Black people can’t function economically in the South, and so then you end up taking away people’s right of disassociation, because they abused it, they abused it so viciously.

0:17:23.0 Trevor Burrus: There’s an interesting observation I think made by my friend John Hasnas, who’s a professor at Georgetown Law, that the existence of a law prohibiting something at least implies that people want to do it, and this is not, not always true, but it implies that you can figure out what the real World is like by looking at the inverse of laws, and Jim Crow laws, which mandated segregation, implies at least that there were people who didn’t want to segregate, otherwise you wouldn’t need such a law. And certainly, as you pointed out, Rachel, you had customers and employers, employees who were racist and didn’t wanna work with people, but there were some people who were totally willing to live next to the African Americans, who were totally willing to employ them, and so they needed a law to make sure that didn’t happen, and I think as you pointed out, if there had been a freer market, that did not mandate segregation, we would have seen more integration, correct, Marcus?

0:18:20.8 Marcus Witcher: Yeah, one of the really fascinating things about the Tulsa, Oklahoma, example is that before Tulsa became a state, before it became a state… Or, excuse me, before Oklahoma became a state, Tulsa was actually in, and Oklahoma in general, was pretty integrated, it wasn’t until the state and the state legislature actually comes together and one of the first things they do is pass Jim Crow segregation laws, and we see the advent of Greenwood as separate from the rest of Tulsa. And so Tulsa is… It’s kind of a great case study for a variety of reasons, but these people, I think one of the sources that we read said, people are too busy getting rich to worry too much about the color of other people’s skin.

0:18:57.0 Marcus Witcher: I mean, I’m sure that’s an exaggeration, I’m sure they were definitely… I mean, it doesn’t mean those people out there weren’t racist against Black Americans, et cetera, but I thought that was really telling that there was sort of integration, and even at the time of the burning in 1921, you have White people living on the Black side of town and you have White neighbors trying to protect their Black neighbors and getting beat up by the mob as it comes in, and so we do see elements of that. We also see businesses throughout the Reconstruction period fighting against state legislation that would basically force them to only serve White customers or only serve… Well, only serve White customers, or only serve Black customers, et cetera. Then there’s been some really good work on street cars in other sort of industries that try to resist the state governments imposing upon them segregation.

0:19:45.0 Trevor Burrus: Rachel, you mentioned the bottom rung, which I think is an important concept throughout your book, in many ways, where in a society where… Due to slavery, due to enslavement of Black Americans, they suffered from many, many educational deficiencies, other types of deficiencies imposed upon them, and so the bottom rung is very important for people who are skill-​wise on the bottom, at least right now, to get that leg up, one of those bottom rungs is you write about in the book, is minimum wage, or one of the things that can be used to take away the bottom rung is the minimum wage. So how is the minimum wage conceptualized by at least some of the proponents of the time who were saying, “We need a minimum wage?”

0:20:28.6 Rachel Ferguson: Yeah, this is really shocking stuff because it’s tied to the eugenics movement, and the eugenics movement is not necessarily understood by both Americans as being a big part of our history, but it’s actually a huge part of our history, it’s something that’s been… I almost feel like it’s been covered up in some sense in academia, maybe because it was so tied to the Progressives and the Progressive era, but it is really ugly. It’s really shocking to read some of the things that people said, and a lot of it were in mainstream economics textbooks, and so you had Presidents, President’s Cabinets, presidents of universities, your John Maynard Keynes, you had all sorts of famous academics that were involved in eugenics and in mainstream economics textbooks, they were saying things like… “Well, we can’t chloroform undesirables right now, so let’s exclude them from employment, right? And then they can kind of fade away or they can be institutionalized.”

0:21:27.9 Rachel Ferguson: I mean, there’s all these just bizarre things being said, and it’s exclusion of Blacks, immigrants, the disabled and women, and so you see the minimum wage as being a way of excluding from employment, specifically for the goal of supporting White male heads of households, because that’s the kind of family and the kind of genes that we want to encourage, and so we wanna discourage everybody else, and so a lot of things are tied together here, you see that with the minimum wage, you see it in the union movement, you see it in immigration laws that arise against the Chinese and other groups, where before we had very open borders, it’s all tied together with this eugenics movement, and so the actual dis-​employment effects of the minimum wage are seen as the advantage of imposing the minimum wage where now people try to say, “Oh, maybe the dis-​employment effects aren’t bad or something,” it’s like, that was literally the point of the first minimum wage laws. It’s very disturbing.

0:22:26.0 Marcus Witcher: Yeah, I think one of the things that most of my students when I teach them American history too don’t really grasp is how racist America was from about 1880 to… All the way up until World War II. I think it’s really World War II, you know, sort of double the victory at home and victory abroad, victory over racism and Nazism abroad, and victory over segregation, discrimination, racism at home, that breaks us out of that, but I mean, when Booker T. Washington takes over the mantle of leader of the race, he’s trying to fight against the scientific racism, this eugenics, the belief by Whites across the country that Blacks are not only racially inferior, but also that Blacks will eventually just die out because they’re the inferior “species”. It’s really, really dark stuff, and it’s hard to sort of in our modern minds to sort of capture how racist sort of 1880 to 1940 or so was in the United States, and you might say globally.

0:23:23.0 Rachel Ferguson: And I’ll just follow up to mention real fast that Milton Friedman calls the minimum wage the most anti-​Negro policy you could think of, and the reason he does that is because increasing numbers of Black unemployed teenagers in particular compared to White teenagers being employed means that they’re not getting that low level of experience, that first entry level job that’s moving them on up the ladder into employment, and so you get higher and higher levels of unemployment, where in the ’40s and ’50s, Black employment is higher than White employment because you have more… You’ve the same number of Black men working and you have more Black women, and so there was no distinction there, where now we have very high levels of unemployment in the Black community compared to the White.

0:24:08.3 Trevor Burrus: A general rule of mine when promoting classical Liberal ideas is, if you do assume that a bunch of people are racist, as Marcus pointed out, and we’ll be… Generally say, especially that time in American and World history, they were very racist, then you probably shouldn’t empower racists to be better at racism via something like the minimum wage, taking away a bottom… Or another one, as you pointed out briefly Rachel, labor unions, which are thought of by many people as a very, very important worker empowering organization, but what happens when the labor union is run by racists? As you could presume would happen from a random assortment of White people, say 1905, you could presume that most of them are probably not gonna be extremely Progressive on race, and now you’ve empowered them with a labor union. So what happened with labor unions?

0:25:01.0 Rachel Ferguson: Well, I wanna emphasize here that the causality actually goes both ways, so one of the ideas of the union movement was a kind of zero-​sum game approach to the economy, this was actually Frederick Douglass’ problem with the union movement, he said, “It’s not so much villainy as honest stupidity, because they think that taking bread… To get bread into my mouth, I’ve gotta take it out of your mouth.” And he’s like, “That’s just wrong,” because he understood market economics, and so if you have that zero-​sum view, then you think, “Okay, if I want my way just to go up, then I’ve gotta exclude other workers.” Well, what am I gonna take advantage of?

0:25:38.0 Rachel Ferguson: Well, whatever is around, right? So if people are racist, well, that’s a great reason to exclude workers, let’s exclude them on the basis of race, and so it wasn’t hard for those two things to come together, that sort of union mentality and being highly racist, and so the union movement ends up being really persistently racist, I mean, into the 60s, you hear James Baldwin complaining on TV interviews about the racism in unions, and so it really persists for a long time, and it also drives up wages in such a way that I think a lot of manufacturing ends up moving offshore or automated sooner than it otherwise would have, so that by the time Black men are finally allowed into the unions, the manufacturing jobs are already leaving, and so it’s a real setback for Black men who are trying to move from manual labor into more white-​collar or trades, you know, in the ’60s and ’70s.

0:26:37.2 Marcus Witcher: Another area in which, sort of to piggy-​back on this point, in which you don’t wanna empower sort of racist was, one specific example was the Journeyman Barbers Association, and what they would do is they would advocate for licensing laws in the state legislatures, and those licensing laws were explicitly aimed, the explicit aim of the Journeyman Barbers Association was to exclude Black barbers who were willing to cut hair on more hours, to charge less, et cetera, and so we see a massive shift in the percentage of barbers who are Black versus White, by the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, because the union is using the state legislature, and they generally do it through the guise of sort of health and wellness, we need more licensing hours, but they ultimately get… In Arkansas, at least they get a law penned into place that’s 1000 hours, 1000 hours of training in order to be a barber, and it just raises the fixed cost to become a barber, and then the test… We’ve done some work on tests as well, it’s not in this specific book, but in the tests, the outcomes of the tests tend to ultimately empower White barbers over Black barbers, which raises some questions about sort of the regulatory apparatus that was set up. So yeah, unions and also licensing restrictions, which we’re still grappling with today.

0:28:00.0 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, that’s one of the… If you are a racist who wants to protect your job and not employ races that you don’t like… But the job is diffuse and not in a factory… Like barbers are not usually put together, then licensing is another option for a diffuse employment situation versus unionization when they’re all in the same factory. Again, empowering racists is generally a bad idea. One of my favorite chapters in the book, ’cause it was very illuminating to me, is about the Black church. Now, it’s important when we talk about being classical Liberals, that we’re not just talking about the ability to buy and sell and contract and have property, just not the economic reality of it, and then the government, but there’s a thing that we call civil society that’s as important, if not more important to the flourishing of human beings, and one of those civil society institutions is the church, just generally church, communities, neighborhoods, things like that. The Black church is a very important institution, and to this day, Black Americans are I think the most religious segment of American population, I think the number in the book is 83%, or 80% or 83% profess deep belief on some level in Christianity. So what is the role of the Black church in terms of coming out of enslavement and then… And helping to build Black communities stronger?

0:29:19.3 Rachel Ferguson: Yeah, this was something that I sort of realized as I was writing the book, that it’s just ridiculous to just try and write a book about Black American history without talking about the Black church, because as Lincoln and Mamiya put it in their sort of classic work on the Black church, they call it the cultural womb of Black America. And I think there’s a couple of really important elements here. The first one is, how empowering the message was for enslaved people, so to here in Genesis one that you are made in the image of God, just like every other human being on the planet, that’s a big deal. And the revivalists actually describe the way that Black converts are filled with joy, so where a lot of White converts would be sort of feeling very guilty about their sin when they would convert, the Black converts are like jumping and dancing because they’re thinking, “Oh, I have a relationship with the king of the universe. This is amazing.” And so there was a real source of self-​esteem, and then the story of the Hebrews being freed from the Egyptians by God through Moses was a huge touchstone for the Black church, who saw it as basically a promise that that’s what God was gonna do for them.

0:30:32.7 Rachel Ferguson: And that God cared about freedom and did not want them to be slaves, and so it motivated, I think, enslaved people to take hold of their freedom, when… The Civil War did finally occur, I don’t know how much… I mean, we could argue, I guess as historians, how much White Northern soldiers were really fighting for the freedom of Black slaves in the South. I don’t know, they were fighting for the union, whatever, but the point is is that enslaved people in the South were gonna take a hold of it, they sure were, and they were gonna do it because they were already praying and singing and thinking and preaching about freedom, both spiritual and physical, because of their faith. And then after emancipation, you see how the church is the one place where Black people are really in charge and they have their own private arena and their leadership is respected, that then becomes like the networking center, it serves so many more purposes than we generally associate with church, it becomes where you do your art shows, where you have your business networks, where you create new music, where Frederick Douglass prints his newspaper, right? In the basement of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church that he’s a part of.

0:31:47.7 Rachel Ferguson: And so, so much community work is going on in the church, and it becomes the place where people can come together and create the fraternal societies and the literary… The literacy efforts, and so much of the amazing accomplishments of the Black community come out of that nexus.

0:32:06.0 Marcus Witcher: Yeah, civil society is absolutely key. And one of the things we really try to emphasize in Chapter 6 about the civil rights movement… I mean, just think of how many of the key leaders came out of the Black church, those who didn’t come out of the Black church were Black businessmen, Black businesswomen, right, who had public… Had created publications, et cetera. And then of course, we talked about the really important work of the fraternal societies to sort of civically educate Black Americans, and so I think those three things are extraordinarily important, all three of them, I think we can discuss as sort of existing in some realm of civil society, you have sort of the businessmen and women, you have fraternal societies, and you have the church, and all those things provide a foundation upon which the civil rights movement can actually be successful. I think in the book we talk about how in 1905… From 1896 to 1905, there are lots of boycotts of street cars to try and bring about desegregation, and they ultimately failed.

0:33:01.2 Marcus Witcher: And one of the things I always ask my students is, why did they fail in 1905, but they succeeded in 1955? It’s because of 50 years of extraordinarily difficult work from the grassroots up, Booker T. Washington sort of philosophy of put down your bucket, so to speak, be where you are, build, be entrepreneurial, create things, educate, organize, all of those things came together then in 1955 to enable a successful boycott in Montgomery. So civil society is absolutely key, both the civil rights movement and key to our book.

0:33:37.0 Rachel Ferguson: Yeah, and we also just should never underestimate the kind of ethical sophistication of the civil rights movement, non-​violent political action that comes out of their faith, and just incredibly disciplined and well-​organized, and I think of the Montgomery bus boycott and people driving each other to work for 381 days or whatever, so it’s absolutely incredible. You would have to have a really thick community to accomplish that kind of thing, and then for Black Americans to turn around at the same time and actually care about the White soul, and the way that the White soul was being affected by racism and wanting to redeem not just themselves, but America as a whole from this terrible history, it’s just a really impressive thing, which makes it all the more depressing that you hear people say things like… You know with Black Lives Matter like, “This isn’t your grandma’s civil rights movement or something,” it’s so disrespectful. It’s like you have no idea the kind of planning and discipline and spiritual advancement that you have to have to do what was done. I wish there was more of that today rather than less.

0:34:39.5 Trevor Burrus: Of course the civil rights movement culminates with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which is still controversial amongst some Libertarians today, because of this idea that you have the right to discriminate. Myself, I… Since the existence of Jim Crow and forced segregation was itself a violation of those principles, and it created an underclass that we let happen for 80 plus years, it might take extraordinary things to fix it, but of course, there’s interesting opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and this is where the Conservatives have to deal with some of their issues in the past and especially the church movement and like… That they were opposing something where, as you point out in your book, if you un-​bungle this and you are not tribal in this, you should be able to recognize both the legitimate grievances and the ability of the marketplace to help, so with the Civil Rights Act, that’s not the end of the story, of course, but it’s a major sign post in the story.

0:35:41.5 Marcus Witcher: Yeah, I think that… So I’ll just quickly say that I think that because the civil rights movement, it sort of ends with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rives Act, I think modern sort of movements for liberation, modern movements for rights tend to look to government to solve the issues and the problems. And one of the things that we really try to do in here is to say like, that was the end goal, regardless of where you stand on sort of 6465, I think it probably was the right response to what was existing at the time, I understand sort of the purists complaints about the right to discriminate, et cetera, but I think given the historical context, I’m not sure what the alternative really would have been at that time, perhaps to just outlaw all Jim Crow laws, right? And enable like… Yeah, that would have been an interesting experiment.

0:36:30.0 Marcus Witcher: I think something like that is what Barry Goldwater would have liked to ideally seen, that would have been probably more messy, but we would have… It would have been a lot messier, probably, although we did… It’s important to know, we did have another 15 years of discrimination… Or extended the discrimination, but also segregation in the form schools, et cetera. But I think one of the things that we really wanna get across to, if you’re an activist today, is that this culminated with government intervention, but it took a lot of sort of grassroots… It took a lot of civil society, it took a lot of hard work, it took a lot of organizing, it took a lot of people who had been engaged in the marketplace to provide the money, the funds, et cetera, in order to lead to the liberation. And so just asking government to intervene and coming up with sort of legislative solutions probably isn’t going to necessarily get you where you wanna be.

0:37:21.0 Rachel Ferguson: I’ll just add, I understand that. Yeah, sort of the purist critique. I think they’re actually making one major mistake, which is that… And I was surprised to learn this when I did kind of a deep dive on the legal conversation, which is that in common law, the idea of public accommodation is actually completely normal. So our understanding of property rights can’t just be this pure sort of enlightenment rationalist idea of individual property rights. Property rights are fuzzy around the edges, you have to figure all sorts of things out, nuisance law and easements and… The idea is that you wanna have, what will make it easiest for people to have exchange for mutual advantage. That’s what you need out of your property rights. And so historically, people did have to accommodate the public if they were doing a public shop. And so it would actually be a departure from our historical property rights to not have that. So I thought that was a really interesting thing to learn, but the other thing is just to emphasize that the founders said this would happen. They said, “Freedoms for virtuous people.” Vicious people can’t be free. Their freedoms will just go away, they just will. They weren’t even necessarily saying they should, they just will.

0:38:31.2 Rachel Ferguson: And I think that’s what happened. If you abuse your freedom as viciously as people did, such that some people were not able to go about their lives and flourish, then you will lose that freedom. And I think that’s what happened. Does it cause all sorts of confusion when we get into anti-​discrimination law now? Yeah, that’s the cost of abusing your freedom. That’s the cost of being morally vicious, and so I think those Libertarians who wanna talk about rights but never wanna talk about maybe community, or they don’t wanna talk as much about how we have to organize ourselves voluntarily, I think this is a lesson in a way to say, you better be working on that and not just on legal rights because you need virtuous voluntary organization or you will lose those rights.

0:39:21.4 Trevor Burrus: Keeping in the ’60s, of course, there’s so much in the book, which I highly highly recommend to listeners, but we have something that has been criticized heavily by Conservatives and Libertarians, which is welfare, the Great Society, which you discussed in the book. How should we approach that as classical Liberals, the costs and benefits of welfare, especially to Black Americans?

0:39:45.0 Rachel Ferguson: Yeah. So we essentially agree with the Conservatives critique of the welfare state. The way that it’s arranged is extremely destructive. Actually, since I’ve written the book, I’ve learned more about just how bad it is, it’s… The incentives are not just a welfare cliff, but a kind of incentive desert. Because the marginal tax rate is so high for people who are welfare dependent. And so there’s just no incentive. To go to work would be economically irrational. But of course, work is a huge part of what it is to have a meaningful life, to feel that you’re contributing, to have structure to your days and things like that. And so helping people just to survive till next week is not doing right by them, it’s not increasing their flourishing, if it’s not transformative… If it’s not something that’s transformative. And so we agree with that critique, we do nuance it to some extent by pointing out that the Progressive story, which tends to emphasize unemployment is also true, right?

0:40:42.6 Rachel Ferguson: That you do have high levels of Black male unemployment in particular, but that the Progressives don’t often remember to blame the unions for that, which they need to do. And then of course, there was a kind of technical part of this, which is the contraception shock that… That really changes male, female… Sexual politics, it affects a family structure, and when you affect family structure, that’s a very fundamental thing for people in terms of other kinds of flourishing like employment. And so we want to agree with Conservatives while telling them to complicate their story a little bit. And then we also want to challenge them and say, “You know what, you’re right that these kinds of programs cause dysfunction, but that means that welfare always causes dysfunction, including corporate welfare.”

0:41:31.8 Rachel Ferguson: And so you should… If you go hard about social welfare, you better go hard about corporate welfare, welfare for the rich, which is having dysfunctional effects on markets and choosing winners and losers in such a way that causes mal-​investment. And so we want them to be even-​handed, and we also want them to put their money where their mouth is. So if you’re really worried about family breakdown and fatherless-​ness, for instance, I certainly hope that you are mentoring a father or a kid who doesn’t have a dad or taking a kid to prison to visit his dad so that he can maintain his relationship. I think sometimes Conservatives temperamentally are really good at the analysis, but not necessarily as good at the action. And yet, especially for those who are professing faith, they really need to follow through on those principles in their personal lives.

0:42:24.9 Marcus Witcher: I’d also say that one of the things that I think Libertarians sometimes miss about the Great Society is the fact that Lyndon Baines Johnson in the administration, this was a political bill that they tour together and they didn’t really know exactly where the money was going to go, et cetera. And they actually did try to sort of, in a sense, they probably weren’t reading higher, but they did try to basically send the money to localities and to the states and to have sort of more knowledge, if you will. You send them the money and not the people who are knowledgeable, the associations, the groups, et cetera. Deal with the problem. The problem was with the Great Society, like with the sort of highway system, is that when you give money to local central planners who, like we said before, are racists or who want to run the highway through the Black neighborhood, you’re going to get really, really devastating results. And so I think even… I’ve seen some recent Progressive historians sort of coming in and critiquing the Great Society on the sort of level as well. And trying to critique the Conservative narrative about it. It wasn’t completely centralized on the ways in which they designed it, but nonetheless, had the same types of sort of results that when you give this money to people who have sort of a vested interest to try and sort of re-​make their city is no surprise when they create ghettos literally for Black Americans.

0:43:51.0 Trevor Burrus: I’m reminded of a quote from Richard Epstein, who once said to me, his rule on welfare and redistribution is redistribution last. So after you have taken the foot of the government off of the employment prospects, the education prospects and all these other things that are not giving people the ability to get on that bottom rung and make life for themselves. If you’ve done all that and then you still need to cut people some checks so they can get by, then it would be a more sensible conversation and not first looking at the structural and institutional problems and legal problems that are keeping people down. Now, Marcus, you pointed out the highway, which I’m very glad that you put that in the book. Because we also have to look at the nature of our cities and the segregation of those cities, as you pointed out, was not always… Definitely not natural, so to speak. It wasn’t in Tulsa before the race riots, it was not the natural condition, but there were many interested players and races who made sure that African Americans didn’t get housing loans from the federal government, redlining and all those kind of things. Then of course, moving that forward and looking at what our cities look like and where the highways go, that itself is a story of property rights and a real kind of oppression of basic classical Liberal ideas.

0:45:05.0 Rachel Ferguson: Yeah. That’s right. So we looked at a book called Folklore of The Freeway by Eric Avila, and he actually goes back and looks at municipal meetings where the town leaders, just as Marcus was explaining, are receiving millions upon millions of dollars in funding. This is the biggest spending outside of war that the federal government has ever done in order to build the highway system. And of course, they’re gonna bring their own values to how this is done. And there were cases, really heartbreaking cases where the highway could have just as easily been placed in an industrial area that would not have disturbed anyone, but they were… It was chosen to go through the Black economic centers to eminent domain, their homes and businesses, really blow apart the community and throw them to the four winds where… How are people gonna reconstitute all of the civil society that they had built? So destructive. And then separate Black people from White people, or out-​west White people from Latino people.

0:46:08.1 Rachel Ferguson: In a way that… With a huge wall of concrete, in a way that’s gonna break down all kinds of possibilities for interaction. And it really was the child of the eugenics movement. The idea, this sort of Progressive social engineering concept that racial groups will do better if they don’t live together. “We are smart and we know this, right? Because we’re full of hubris. And so we’re going to impose that from above.” And it was an absolute disaster. And we’re still paying for it to this day.

0:46:35.7 Marcus Witcher: Yeah. I was really, really appalled as we got into the research for these chapters on the Great Society, the highways and whatnot, about the just clear injustices that were committed in the past including injustices that Conservatives seemingly don’t acknowledge, even though in this case, there are oftentimes perpetuated by Progressives who are trying to socially engineer, but like the highway system. It happened in Montgomery, it happened in St. Louis, I believe it happened in Memphis. We think about Oakland. Oakland was… Oakland is not in the South guys. [chuckle] The segregation that exists in places like California or Detroit or Milwaukee, those are a product of government directly coming in or providing the resources, and then local sort of bureaucrats and elected officials drawing… Running those highways directly, as Rachel said, through Black prosperous. Oftentimes, Black neighborhoods, destroying civil society, destroying families, destroying opportunities. This is just a clear injustice, right? And Richard Rothstein talks about this at great length in the Color of Law. Of course, he draws the conclusion that out of this, we need more government to somehow solve this problem which you just sort of hit yourself in the head.

0:47:51.5 Rachel Ferguson: Yeah, and they follow this up immediately with urban renewal, which is a kind of slum clearance. But James Baldwin called it Negro removal, because what looks like a slum to you could be an upwardly mobile working class neighborhood to somebody else. And so it was like two hits right in a row on top of that HA redlining, which had been going on for 40 years already. So it was just so many destructive things happening, and then we’re surprised that we’re stuck with really poor struggling inner city neighborhoods. It’s like “No, we created these neighborhoods.”

0:48:30.4 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. Richard came on a couple of years ago. We’ll put a link to that, the Color of Law, which is a very, very good book, but I sympathize and being like, “Well, I’m not sure that the proposed government programs would be run any better than the ones that were in the past that created this situation.” And now, of course, on top of the segregation of the cities and the destruction of Black neighborhoods, we graphed a public school system that is Geo locked in an interesting way, which creates massive, massive problems in inner city schools. So does that need to be part of the story to the nature of public education and how that is being. Not… Let’s just say not run well in the inner city? That we need to focus on that too if we’re going to appreciate the lessons of people like Booker T. Washington and Fredrick Douglas and education is that bottom rung that has always helped people, African-​American or whatever race you are achieve better things in life.

0:49:24.1 Marcus Witcher: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve basically segregated America. The government basically segregated America, and then we forced Black children to go to school and in schools that are drawing property taxes from areas that don’t have a great amount of tax base. And then we wonder why there’re disparities, racial disparities in educational outcomes. The clear answer is to allow school choice to provide vouchers to parents, to allow Black and Latina and working class families all across America, the same opportunity that middle class and upper class Americans have now, which is to take that money and to send their kids to the schools of their choice. And as a result of that, the result of giving vouchers to folks for allowing more choice, what would happen is we see a whole slew of sort of educational entrepreneurs come in to fill the demand to provide better education, whether it be technical or whether it be more sort of formal, like we have now. Who knows what the model will be?

0:50:22.9 Marcus Witcher: That’s the beautiful thing. And perhaps for some people the scary thing about the marketplace is that we don’t know how good it could be but what we do know right now is that a large number of individuals or families, not just Black families to be clear, are trapped in really, really poorly performing schools that have a culture that is very, very destructive to the development of those children. And Rachel can talk a little bit more about some of the other costs beyond just sort of educational. Because sometimes people say, “Well, charter schools don’t perform all that much better than the public schools do.” But as Rachel likes to point out, that’s not the only metric for whether or not school choice vouchers charters are actually successful.

0:51:05.9 Rachel Ferguson: Yeah. One of the ways in which charter schools have been very consistently performing is the much, much lower rates of going into the criminal justice system, even if things like teen pregnancy. Things that mean a lot to parents. Mental and physical well-​being for their kids, it might take another generation to bring the academics up even more. Some charters are very impressive, but others are sort of comparable, but they’re much better on these other measures. And I think it’s too easy from maybe a middle or upper class perspective to just look at the test numbers and not realize how much these other measures matter to parents. I do wanna tweak slightly what Marcus said, because it’s true that you are drawing on an area with a lower property taxes, but it’s also true that a lot of times you get a bunch of funding from the state or from the federal government to make up for it. And so sometimes in inner city schools you’re actually spending more. Quite a bit more. That’s true in St. Louis.

0:52:00.5 Trevor Burrus: In Washington DC, I think it’s $27,000 per pupil per year, which is the most in the nation.

0:52:06.2 Rachel Ferguson: Oh, and if you guys haven’t watched the documentary Miss Virginia, you’ve gotta see it. Where she finds the numbers in the trash can, she finds the chart and it’s like $30,000 a student, she’s like, “What? I’m busting my butt to get my son to private school, I can’t even afford it, and you’re spending $30,000 per student?” You can go to a Catholic school sometimes for 8000 bucks. Or be on scholarship or whatever. So I think the issue is not so much that there’s not enough money, but the fact that there’s no competition, as Marcus said, means that the money is not well spent. And so we see how you have ballooning administration, but we also see how the model is one size fits all because there’s no competition. And the fact is, is that if you’re growing up in a fairly chaotic neighborhood where you’re coming home to police tape across your neighbor’s house or something, that’s really traumatic. You’re dealing with a ton of obstacles that your Joe Schmoe suburban teenager is not dealing with. And what that means is that you have to be even more creative in the way you bring education to those students. They may need more structure, they may need more food, they may need more…

0:53:17.7 Rachel Ferguson: There may be all sorts of things that you have to do differently. But you’re not really allowed ’cause you have such a one size fits all approach through the public school system. So, I wanna add, I think that not only could educational choice be amazing for students, I think it could actually be amazing for teachers. I think we could see teachers really letting their creativity go with all kinds of learning pods and different groups and making more money than they make now, but they would have to have a much more entrepreneurial mindset.

0:53:46.7 Marcus Witcher: Yeah. It really is shocking how much we spend on… How much we’ve increased spending over the course of the last 40 years or so, and I think the Cato Institute has a wonderful graph… A wonderful write up that shows that spending levels have gone up astronomically while sort of outcomes have remained completely stagnant over the course of the last 40 years. Which tells you there’s a structural problem. There’s a lack of competition, et cetera. And so, yeah. I mean, school choice… I think the school choice moment is here. I’m not really sure why. I’m… To be cynical. I think Democrats are captured by the teacher’s unions, which is why they generally opposed school choice. But I think that most Progressives would agree that we should empower minority families to send their kids to whatever schools that they choose, and if we have to sort of compromise, in a sense, and provide some sort of public accommodation to get those kids where they need to go, where their parents wanna send ‘em.

0:54:39.4 Marcus Witcher: I don’t know of Libertarians would be opposed to that small cost in order to allow kids to break out of… I’m talking Rachel, of course, if you have parents who can’t get their kids to places and stuff. But I mean, there’s ways that we can work with the Left on this, but this seems like something that should be a clear… If we wanna call it… I call it just a justice issue, and they can call it social justice if they want. This is just a justice issue, and I don’t understand why there’s not more bipartisan support for school choice across the country. Hopefully, we’ll get there. It looks like we’re moving in that direction.

0:55:10.0 Rachel Ferguson: 60% to 70% of Black and Latino families are pro-​school choice.

0:55:14.3 Trevor Burrus: Here, here. Well, there’s so much in the book. Again, I highly recommended it. Before we started recording I said, “Write the book that you wanna read.” There so many papers and things that maybe are harder to get, like Bob Higgs work is put in there. So if you wanna read about the drug war and gun laws and then everything else, it’s in there too. But I do think for the end, we do need to ask about reparations. Because what we’ve been talking about is just a lot of stuff that we, I’m putting that in scare quotes. Some sort of sense of ‘we’, the United States governments around the country did to Black Americans. So how do we feel about the case for reparations in light of all these facts in your book?

0:55:58.3 Marcus Witcher: Yeah, I think Rachel and I are in agreement that where we can clearly see past injustice, like in the case of Japanese internment, we can clearly tie it to a certain group of people who have been wronged, that we should address that as a country, as a nation, as a community. I will say that Rachel and I don’t expect that reparations, the sort of cash payment model to be very effective. We don’t think that’s going to lead to Black betterment. We talk about transitional justice in the book, we talk about neighborhood stabilization in the book, we talk about other things that we think will be much more beneficial than reparations to bring about sort of prospering. A sort of prosperity, et cetera.

0:56:38.1 Marcus Witcher: But we do agree that when there’s been systemic injustice, like we’ve seen here, we should probably go ahead and address that past injustice. So we acknowledge it as a community and as a society. Because you can’t really heal from something without recognizing that that’s something exist in the past. And Rachel and I like to sort of… My advisor in graduate school, his name is David Beto, he’s a great historian. And David and I were talking one day and he goes, “You know, reparations. Maybe we should just… All that federal land out west, maybe we should just sell it all and then we could take reparations out of that, and then no taxpayer today is having to pay for something that they themselves didn’t participate in.” ‘Cause that’s what the critique always get from Conservatives. Well, I didn’t do this, so why should I have to pay taxes in order to provide reparations. Well it’s like, “Well, let’s kill two birds with one stone.” Let’s take all of that land out west or a large amount of land out west, and let’s put into private hands. It will be way more productive and we can give the proceeds or we can distribute the proceeds through various systems. I think Rachel has some specific ideas on those.

0:57:43.4 Rachel Ferguson: Well, yeah, let me just say I’m in the middle of a really good conversation with Robert E. Wright, whose work we used way back in Chapter 2 on the cost of slavery, the economic cost of slavery. But he’s written another book called Financial Exclusion where… He and I are talking right now, I’m actually working on an article where we might think about what would genuinely build wealth. Because the big complaint is still the wealth gap. And so in what way could we channel this money in order to build wealth. And in the book, I wasn’t really sure yet, I have some kind of maybe a way to provide capital for business people or something like that. But we’re now playing with… Talking about things like, what can you do to build things like Black banking or Native American banking or rural banking for poor Whites? How can you reduce regulatory barriers that make it impossible to give out small loans because you’ve got so much processing costs because of Dodd Frank, that you can’t even give out a small mortgage or a small business loan, it’s not worth your time. So what can we do to fund efforts like that, or even just lower the barriers, efforts like that so that we’re actually building wealth with that money. And then one of the points that I always make, because I wanna address Conservative critics is that we’re not talking about slavery here, okay.

0:59:04.2 Rachel Ferguson: Reparations generally are limited to a human lifetime because otherwise we could all owe each other reparations if we go far enough back in history, right? But if you look at a human lifetime, listen, we all know Jim Crow survivors, we know people who impose Jim Crow on others. Jim Crow… Just the other day on Twitter, somebody was pointing out that, believe in interracial marriage didn’t pass the majority population mark until 1997. I mean, that’s how close we are to some of this terrible oppression of even things like being able to marry who you wanted to marry. So we’re looking at the sins of Jim Crow, and even some of the ones that came after Jim Crow, like the highways and the urban renewal, that were still at work and really causing possibly even more damage in terms of being community-​wide, and so what can we do to just pour into entrepreneurs who are then empowering their whole community, they’re hiring people. They’re building wealth for others and so forth.

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1:00:17.9 Trevor Burrus: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ares. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.