Marketplace heartbreak. Hope and promise of america. Its a book that chronicles the painful failures of policy while also having some solutions from a Classical Liberal perspective. Marcus Richard Ferguson argue that a political system ought uphold individual rights encourage voluntary exchange and Civil Society to flourish. He couldnt tell im not an american but ive always admired the United States in its history. Its a nation founded an enlightenment values and committed individual rights and the rule of law. The founding of america was unique event in Human History and best described by a question that the second president john adams asked. He asked how few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children. The United States we live in today is not the result of mere chance, but a conscious choice on behalf of the founders to create a new order of the ages. Unlike feudal europe built on centuries of customs and hierarchy america was founded upon principles. Principles found the documents like the declaration of independence but being the first of its kind meant that americans had no blueprint or roadmap to follow. Over the course of history america is often fallen short of the promise of the declaration of independence denying black americans their birthright of freedom the institution of slavery the dreads got decision jim crow laws and modernday Police Brutality all of which are an insult the proposition that we are all born free and equal. The advancements have been made. We cannot turn our eyes away from the past failures. Especially when those failures continue to affect the prosperity life and liberty of black americans this day. But you didnt come here listen to me talk. So instead only truce our guests. First off we have marcus witcher. He received his phd in the university of alabama and is currently an assistant professor at huntington college. His Research Cover is the economic intellectual. Sorry. His Research Covers the Political Economic and intellectual history from 1920 to the present day. Hes author of the book getting reagan. Sorry getting right with reagan the struggle for the conservatism 1982 2016. Rachel witcher or Rachel Ferguson receiver phd in philosophy from st. Louis university as professor of concordia university, chicago. Shes assistant dean of the college of business and director of the Free Enterprise center. Heroic folks intersection of philosophy and economics of virtue shes also an affiliate scholar at the acton institute. And finally here to moderate our discussion is amisha cross who has many hats as a media host a democratic strategist and activist. She spent a career working in politics and policy serving the Vice President al gore and former president barack obama. Shes a body organizations such as the National Urban league and the naacp were going to start off by rachael giving us a quick introduction to broad overview of the book. Then amish will take over asking questions. At the hour mark, were going to take questions from the audience both in person and online if you want to ask questions online, please use the hashtag kido events and thanks again for coming. Hope you enjoy and learn something new. Well, hello everybody. Thank you for coming. Ill just start out by saying sort of how we were inspired to take up this project marcus and i are both Classical Liberal scholars. And you know if you run in those circles, you know that Classical Liberals have a lot of great insights on race and discrimination really important work thats been done in economics in the history of economics. But were not necessarily known for that. Are we people dont necessarily associate Classical Liberals with as a great resource for thinking about race and discrimination, and we wanted to solve that by bringing together a lot of the great insights that Classical Liberals. Have we thought that that would also serve another purpose which is just sort of address some of this tribalism and polarization that were experiencing in our country right now. As Classical Liberals we sometimes agree with conservatives and we sometimes agree with progressives. It depends on the issue and so having that ability to be a politically homeless to be outside of the tribes to bust out of those categories and unbundled one issue from another we felt could really serve us well in thinking about the history of black america in particular because black americans as well. Do not fit well into the political categories of the majority culture. And so we thought it gave us a great opportunity the first thing you have to do when thinking through the history of black america, of course is to address the relationship between markets and slavery. And so immediately as we jump into the book we take a look at the new historians of capitalism who are kind of rolling the idea of markets into all of the different forms of oppression, like colonialism and imperialism, and were saying we really have to separate these out we have to go back to adam smith. We have to go back to john stewart mill who knew not only how immoral slavery is because its a violation of your most fundamental property, right . Youre right in your own body. But also how economically foolish it is. Anytime that we take a group of people in our population, and we dont allow them to improve their human capital. We dont allow them to move around to where their labor is most needed. We dont allow them to invent things and sell them. We are all losers. So yes did a few southern planters get rich. Yes, of course they did but thats not what free markets do free markets. Dont make a few aristocratic types rich free markets make regular people. There they make the lives of regular People Better off and regular southerners werent better off. They were worse off even poor white southerners had their wages dragged down by the fact that they were competing with those who were enslaved and of course the lives of the enslaved were ruined by their slave masters in many ways. As we go on though, we look at emancipation and we see that after emancipation black americans are so excited about the possibility of owning land and owning farms. But of course, we all know how that story went. They were not given any land in compensation for all of the stolen labor. And so they went on to enter into sharecropping and one of the things we noticed there. Is that while so many of their rights were still being abrogated courts were not really recognizing their Property Rights or their freedom of contract. They had one very precious, right and it was the right to leave. It was the freedom of movement because you could threaten to go because you could move from the deep south to the upper south because you could remove yourself from that farm and go over to that farm over a few decades. You saw the formerly enslaved friedman now bidding up their wages or in this case. Theres shares quite a bit and even though theyre starting from very low point. You actually see black incomes rise at two and a half or three times as fast as white incomes at that time. So there is some catching up happening there, but we also see an amazing flourishing of black Civil Society. We see the arise of educational efforts particularly coming out of the church and we see one of possibly one of the most amazing leaps forward in literacy in the history of the world thus far going from basically zero at emancipation to 80 by 1930. I mean, its quite stunning. And there are just efforts everywhere in this regard. So thats a kind of positive story but as we go on this rollercoaster ride through black american history, we have to stop and look at the atrocities against black americans. Some of them are quite famous like the thousands of lynchings that occurred but others are not as well known like convict leasing in which black men in particular were just criminalized with many laws. That didnt even make sense like vagrancy laws that treated you like a criminal just for standing around and not having a job or not being able to prove that you have a job. I could go on and on about the ridiculous crimes in these men were charged with but the worst part is that they were then leased out to minds and farms as workers. And because they werent owned. They werent even seen as an investment. And so they were treated even worse than they were treated under slavery and many of them simply died. They were treated so badly that if any kind of sickness came through the camp 2030 and sometimes even 40 of the men in the camps. This happened to tens of thousands of black american men. Its an absolute tragedy and there are many other atrocities that we deal with in that chapter including things like the massacre in tulsa, oklahoma. We turn then to a more positive story looking at the history of the black church. We see how black americans really identified with the idea of being made in the image of god right having the same equal status with their White Brothers and sisters. We see them identifying with the story of the exodus and being released from slavery that dream of freedom and we see them identifying with the prophets who care for the poor and the widow and the orphan and the stranger and they feel cared for by god. We see how the black Church Becomes like the cultural womb of black america in which so many other forms of networks, including business legs and mutual aids societies and literacy efforts in School Efforts all flow out of that wonderful thick civil. Any institution . And then in chapter 6 we take a look at black entrepreneurship beginning with the great booker t, washington, of course washington gets kind of panned as an accommodationist. Sometimes given his debate with web du bois and of course being in the deep south. He did have to be very careful about what he said. He was an actual physical danger from being assassinated if he spoke out of turn, but secretly booker t. Washington was actually funding a lot of the great legal efforts for Political Rights as he was working on getting blacks into positions where they could be owning property starting businesses and really flourishing economically, and so we try to tell a longer story of civil rights that starts with the Business Community and the churches who are building up a black middle and upper class that are then able to be the lawyers and the funders of the fight for civil rights later on. So we really see booker t, washington as playing. Part there that he doesnt always get credit for and we go on to talk about the wonderful stories of madam. Cj walker, of course, john h. Johnson the very brave publisher who put the picture of emmett till into ebony and jet magazine, and of course trm howard the great black hospitaler who protected the family of emmett till during their trial and was a mentor to medgar evers and Fannie Lou Hamer so thats just a wonderful reflection on what black americans were able to accomplish despite all of the ridiculous obstacles that were being put in their way. Then as we move on we take a look at some of the really egregious. The egregious eugenicist views of the progressive era where right at the turn of the century, you know, its sometimes underestimated. Just how popular these eugenicist ideas were the notion of racial superiority and inferiority on a pseudoscientific basis. And from there we see the rise of the minimum wage the idea of the minimum wage and the notion that we can disemploy certain people so that the white aryan head of household can be supported by the economy and everyone else can just kind of fade away. Really sick and strange philosophy and we go on to see how the progressives push for massive social Engineering Projects like in the way that the federal Housing Administration used redlining to keep black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods separate along with immigrant neighborhoods as well. They go on to use that that social engineering mindset to build the federal highway system. Right, and so as municipal leaders are given millions of dollars to decide where these highways go instead of putting them through some industrial area. That wont affect anybody they decide purposefully to put them right through the black Economic Centers in so Many American cities and Latino Centers out west and its a terrible case of Eminent Domain abuse with Property Rights being violated. And of course the really tragic part of the story is the way in which the Civil Society institutions the Business Districts the schools the churches. The networks are just blown apart by blowing apart these neighborhood centers, and its only made worse by urban renewal which James Baldwin called removal because the same thing was done by taking away peoples property and in many cases not even compensating that as the constitution requires. And so we go on to look at the effect of the great society. We agree with many conservatives who see the terrible disincentives in the way that our welfare system is arranged the perverse incentives against work in marriage. We agree with that critique, but we also sort of challenge our conservative friends to be just as hard on other forms of welfare. Corporate welfare, which will also cause all sorts of malinvestment. And dysfunction in the economy and we go on to look at other social factors and then by the end of the book were coming up to the present day and were looking at the rise of the drug war. Were looking at mass incarceration at this point. Were looking at things in america that are actually not specifically black issues because theyre affecting all americans, but were gonna hear from black people about the more because black people are desperately affected sometimes because of race and sometimes because of class because theyre overrepresented below the poverty line and so we shouldnt be surprised when we hear about this particularly from the black community. And so we look at creative Market Solutions to thinking better about how we can deal with the mass incarceration crisis. And of course we want to end the drug war. And throughout the book as were going through kind of the history. We drop in two things one are lessons in Classical Liberalism where we just take advantage of moments where we can explain various things about Classical Liberalism in a way thats very easily understood by a popular audience. So if you have friends who arent familiar with Classical Liberalism, this is a great way to help them out and then we also drop in Solutions IncludingEconomic Freedom educational freedom criminal Justice Reform those things. I assume youre somewhat familiar with but the two that you may be less familiar with or Transitional Justice which is an idea that has to do with healing huge societywide massive injustices and one of the main things we focus on there is the idea of institutional memory. We think the conservatives and libertarians should be just as excited about going into our local histories and really telling the stories of the survivors and those who were harmed by racist policies historically because its so important for our healing process if we dont tell the truth, we will never be able to reconcile and then finally Neighborhood Stabilization is the idea that no matter if we get every single policy we want and we get everything in place that we think is right politically. Some of these neighborhoods particularly in our very isolated inner cities. Are so destabilized that theres a gap in terms of bandwidth. You have people who would love to take advantage of all the things that are being provided but have too much to contend with and i call it network poverty, right . Theyre so isolated from the Employment Networks for instance that they need to take advantage of the only solution to this is a bottomup solution. We need a decentralized solution in which individual people and groups and philanthropic efforts are on the ground walking through life with people surrounding neighbors with the resources that we all take for granted right the kinds of networks that we take for granted. Thats a labor of love. Thats not something a policy or a check in the mail or a Government Office can do but its what weve got to do and im very excited to inform you that its already being done by people like bob lupton and atlanta with his focus Community Strategies by the great john perkins of the Christian Community development association, bob woodson who many of you know, Brian Fickert wrote wonderful book called when helping hertz where he deals with flipping our philanthropic model and really empowering people in dignifying them by treating them as not just as recipients, right who im going to sort of drop my gift on your head, but rather as someone with whom i want to exchange and