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Join the Libertarian Christian Institute as each week they explore, debate, and analyze the issues that are directly relevant to the intersection of Christianity and liberty. Always thoughtful, frequently controversial, and never boring (trust us), it is our hope and prayer that The Libertarian Christian Podcast serve as a valuable resource to the Church for years to come.
If you'd like to reach out to us and ask a question or submit some feedback, you can reach us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and of course, our website, libertarianchristians.com.
Matt Bellis:
[0:03] Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the statist quo, expand your imagination, and tackle controversy head on. Let's stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It's time for the Libertarian Christian Podcast.
Cody:
[0:24] You're listening to the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian
Cody:
[0:28] Christian Institute and a member of the Christians for Liberty Network. That's a lot of liberties and a lot of Christians. My guest today is Dr. Rachel Ferguson. Dr. Ferguson is the director of the Free Enterprise Center at Concordia University, Chicago. She's the assistant dean of the College of Business and professor of business ethics. She's also written for National Review, The Dispatch, The Christian Post, Religion and Liberty, Perfectus, Law and Liberty, in the Washington Times. I think that's just some of the more high-profile ones. She's also an affiliate scholar of the Acton Institute, where actually I got to meet her at Acton University, which was wonderful, and the co-author of the book Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, which we will be discussing today. So Dr. Ferguson, welcome to the Libertarian Christian Podcast.
Rachel:
[1:12] Thanks for having me.
Cody:
[1:13] Yes, I was actually surprised we hadn't talked to you before, because I was aware of your book for a few years, and I just kind of came on more recently as one of the hosts here. And I was searching through the archives that your name didn't come up. So it's a long overdue, but thank you for being here.
Rachel:
[1:25] Yeah, absolutely.
Cody:
[1:27] So, okay. So your book, Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, if I were to sum it up in a few words, I'd probably say something like this. The worst acts of racism in the United States have essentially been failures of the state to respect the libertarian rights of life, liberty, property, and commerce. As a result, the path toward greater prosperity and freedom for Black Americans, must be through government getting out of the way. Is that a fair summary or is there something I'm missing that's important?
Rachel:
[1:54] That's a pretty good summary. I like it. I think the only thing I would add is that it also involves a certain approach to civil society, which is up to us, right? So not just to get government out of the way, but repair things through civil society institutions. And I'm certainly not downplaying the reality of psychological racism or whatever you might want to call it, that's for sure. But we do see the state actually intervening to artificially stoke that kind of racism in quite a few ways, so that the organic process of moving away from a racist society was turned back, you know, quite a few times. And so, yeah, a lot of the blame goes on the state for sure.
Cody:
[2:37] Well, sometimes I'll hear libertarians say things like, you know, without the state, racism is just a bad idea. And that seems like an oversimplification because I think obviously there's been some significant racism and violence that the state had nothing to do with.
Cody:
[2:51] But we'll get into some more of those details. So maybe before I do that, I'll maybe kind of start by asking a somewhat delicate question because I suspect that some viewers may be wondering about it themselves. Are you a person of color yourself?
Rachel:
[3:04] No, I'm white as a sheet.
Cody:
[3:08] Well, you have a look about you where I suspect, I would look and say, maybe she's passing, you know, as they say. No, no. Okay.
Rachel:
[3:14] I actually had seven ancestors on the Mayflower, so I'm very, very white.
Cody:
[3:19] Oh, wow. Okay. Well, so you're what some would call a heritage American then.
Rachel:
[3:24] Oh, gosh. Let's not go there.
Cody:
[3:27] Well, some on the left would, I think, say, OK, well, I'm already tuning out. You shouldn't be writing this book. You know, if you're if you're black, that means you're on the left. The solutions you're advocating, they're born from white privilege. So, you know, our beliefs in individual rights and limited government, free markets, are those things white coded or can we find them among respected and thoughtful African-American thinkers as well? I mean, is this you trying to push a white view onto black people?
Rachel:
[3:54] I don't think so. No. So, you know, a lot of the great abolitionists were free marketeers. Now, some of them were white, like William Lloyd Garrison and so forth. But Frederick Douglass himself was a free marketeer. And he's actually well known for arguing against tariffs over in Europe and arguing for cheaper food prices for the Irish, you know, working man, you know, by eliminating tariffs. So you have a strong tradition there. As time goes on, you actually see classical liberals being some of the most prominent people fighting for black rights, including two of the main founders of the NAACP, actually his first president, who was his president for decades, was a serious classical liberal. That was a white and a black project together. But somebody like George Shiler is a great example. He was the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, which is the greatest African-American newspaper in the early 20th century. And he was a very serious classical liberal who was black and who also actually argued against Japanese internment camps and against FDR and was Rose Wilder Lane's boss, right? Because he was the editor and she worked there.
Rachel:
[5:06] And later on, you get, you know, for instance, the novelist Zora Neale Hurston, who's also a great anthropologist, she gets kicked out, basically, of the Harlem Renaissance by Langston Hughes because of her individualism, which went against his communism. And I'll just add, you know, some of the great jazz artists, or I should say commentators, like Albert Murray, were very strong in this regard as well. They really never allowed themselves to be bifurcated between kind of the left-right distinction, which jazz people are good at, at nuance, right? And so there's a strong, long tradition of both white classical liberals fighting for black rights and, or I should say for the individual rights of black people, and black people embracing classical liberalism. And this will actually be the subject of our next book, our follow-up book to Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, which will be called The Real Anti-Racists, Classical Liberals Against Minority Oppression.
Cody:
[6:06] When's that coming up?
Rachel:
[6:08] Well, we have to write it first. We have all of our bios. So it'll be a series of bios of these great heroes, really, against minority oppression. And what we show, and I think maybe I can sort of add to your question there, is that, you know, neither conservatives nor progressives have a very good record when it comes to racism, right? Because progressives have the whole eugenics movement under their belt. And a lot of the stuff FDR did was very anti-black. You have a lot of those sorts of issues progressives really need to own. And then, of course, conservatives have the more obvious ones. And so what's amazing is that classical liberals, we actually don't have very many examples of virulent racists among classical liberals, which I think is really interesting. And to the extent that classical liberals were actively working against minority oppression, they were often some of the most effective activists because they were thinking about using the legal system and so forth.
Cody:
[7:05] Well, you know, someone like Frederick Douglass comes to mind who emerges in this context of, well, he emerges in not post-slavery, but during slavery. And, you know, he's somebody who is, I think, is a kind of a fiercely individualistic person, which makes a lot of sense in the context of a sort of a collectivized racial kind of big government sort of approach to these issues. And, you know, he sort of is asked this question, you know, what should Americans, what should the whites do with the blacks? And he says, leave us alone. Right. And that's such a wonderful libertarian answer. Okay, so, you know.
Cody:
[7:40] Just maybe a little bit, for those who maybe need some of the cobwebs swept away a little bit as we're thinking of these issues as kind of left and right, it seems sometimes that the only people talking about black empowerment are on the left. And that would sort of suggest that to care about black people or black issues requires a progressive framework. And I think that idea goes back at least as far as the early half of the last century when the only political party in the United States that was advocating for black rights was the Communist Party, that the Democrat and Republican parties were both pretty much ambivalent. To the cause of civil rights. So, you know, Paul Robeson, the singer and actor, famously sent his son to be educated in the Soviet Union because he thought that was his best chance of growing up without racism.
Cody:
[8:25] And, you know, just to be a little autobiographical, when I was shifting toward libertarianism from the left, one of my kind of holdover issues that was maybe, stopping me from moving, and I'm using the word libertarian. I think you'd use the word more classical liberal or the phrase more classical liberal, but we're roughly in the same ballpark. But when I was shifting into libertarianism, racial inequality was something that stuck with me because I kind of had this perception in my head that only the left really cared about that issue and only they were really meaningfully addressing it. And so before I could take the plunge, I had to really see that libertarianism
Cody:
[8:57] was a better antidote to racism than progressivism was. So that's a long background. But with all that being said, do you think it's important for libertarians and traditional free market conservatives and classical liberals to be seen as addressing African-American concerns specifically and to show how freedom rather than big government can better address them? Is this a big issue that we need to be very focused on that or just kind of keep doing the same thing we're doing and hopefully everybody will pick up on it?
Rachel:
[9:28] Yes, I do. I think it's very important. As a matter of fact, it's why I wrote the book. So one of the reasons that I came up with the idea for Black Liberation Through the marketplace is because I knew that classical liberal scholars actually had a ton of work that they had done on racial discrimination. So this includes Robert Higgs's greatest, really, really great work, Competition and Coercion, which is, you know, post-emancipation Black economy. You've got Gary Becker winning a Nobel Prize for his understanding of racial discrimination, you know, and then you have all of these major figures actually being activists, starting the end of ACP, etc. So.
Rachel:
[10:03] All of that to say, I think it's really important to present the classical liberal perspective on Black American history as an alternative, because here's my argument. Conservatives and libertarians often want to complain about the way that the left controls the narrative, let's say, with regard to racial injustice. But if you're not in the room, you don't get to have a say in the narrative, right? And so whoever's left in the room is going to suck all the air out of the room. So you kind of can't complain, right? And so what I wanted to do is show up and say, no, actually, we have a story to tell that's gracious, intelligent, and enlightening from the perspective of free market economics. Conservatives can actually begin to speak with more sensitivity on this topic by embracing what I'm teaching them because they don't have to say no to what they know to be true with regard to, for instance, the excellence of the American Constitution or free market economics. Right. And I'm using conservative in the old sense, I guess, in the old Reagan sense now, however it's used now. I'm not sure. But and so for that reason, I think it's really important. And there is exactly the stereotype that you have. Right. Which is that the left cares about black issues and nobody else does, which means that black voters, that's what they're going to hear. Right.
Rachel:
[11:19] Right. And so if you have a lot of liberty oriented people saying, hey, are you aware of this whole like like, for instance, after MLK went a little left economically after 1964, there was a whole, head of a church denomination, black church denomination that wrote a book arguing, no, we should be lifting ourselves up. We're not depending on the government for this. The black church sort of split, actually, over that issue, largely speaking. So people need to know that, right? That there's this incredible legacy of liberty-oriented Black thinkers and white thinkers who were supporting Black rights the entire time, and that they're not turning their back on being a Black American if they do that. And then I'll just add one more thing, because I know what your listeners are thinking.
Rachel:
[12:03] You know, some listeners will say to me things like, why do we have to talk about black and white anymore? You know, why have a black student union if you can't have a white student union? You know, that sort of thing. And so let me just very clearly delineate here. When I say black American, I am not referring to skin color. I am referring to a subculture. It's an ethnicity. These are people who came up through the southeastern part of the United States, had a culture that was actually shared with white Southerners in many ways, but then also was separate, right? So when we talk about the black style of preaching or black gospel music, we know what we mean, right? Or soul food, you know, we all know what we mean. And so that's a particular ethnic heritage. Being white isn't, right? So if you told me you were Irish Catholic, I would know something about you. You know what I mean? If you told me that you have, you know, Eastern European background, I might know something about you. But I don't know anything about you just by you telling me you're white. And I don't, when I say Black American, I don't mean a Nigerian who just came here and got citizenship, right? I'm talking about people who are actual descendants of slavery.
Cody:
[13:15] Gotcha. Well, that's a helpful clarification.
Cody:
[13:20] So there's something that you discuss in the book that's been discussed by others as well, which is that this kind of a new history of capitalism that argues that slavery is really just, it's kind of part and parcel with capitalism. And I think part of that is just kind of a poor definition of capitalism, that capitalism just means people making a profit off of others. And since slavery is making a profit off of others, that must mean it's capitalist. But the other part of this is that there's this argument that American slavery was actually highly profitable, that it fits in really well with kind of a free market ideology and that it, was beneficial for those who engaged in it, not the slaves, but everyone else. So the question I guess I have is, was American slavery profitable? If so, for whom? And what kind of benefits to society at large were lost because of slavery? And I feel like I'm packing too much into this, but is there a real danger of this progressive implication that injustice is the most efficient and profitable way to organize an economy? Because that seems to be kind of the implication that if you really want to have a good economy, then you have to have people taking advantage of each other.
Rachel:
[14:31] Right. And if you don't, then you need to be a de-growther.
Cody:
[14:34] Right, right.
Rachel:
[14:35] If you don't want to take advantage of people. Yeah, I think that's a real danger. So first of all, the slavery economy was profitable. The South did very well comparatively to other countries. It did not do well compared to the North. Now, some people might say, well, it was agricultural and the North was industrial, right? But it made a lot of money and some of the Southern planters were as rich as some of the Northern industrialists. The difference is the spread of wealth throughout the Southern economy. So what you had, Southern planters were actually just, frankly, a few families. You know what I mean? It was a very, very small group of people. And that small group of people was incredibly wealthy, while the rest of the white population was very, very poor.
Rachel:
[15:20] OK, so poor, as a matter of fact, that when Frederick Douglass went north and people talked about poor whites, he was like, these aren't poor whites. I'll show you some poor whites. You know, he was like, what are you talking about? So what you didn't get was what we claim in the Great Enrichment, right? When we talk, when Deirdre McCloskey and others talk about the Great Enrichment, what we're talking about is not that there's more wealth, but the kings and nobles have it, right? We're saying there was more wealth for regular people. There was more wealth for normal people.
Rachel:
[15:50] And so the spread of wealth is much, much more equal in the North where you have a very large middle class. There's really no middle class, hardly at all. There's a small one, but not hardly at all in the South. And so you built wealth, but you concentrated wealth. And what that meant is that the Southern economy simply just didn't develop in a lot of ways. It wasn't very innovative. You know, remember that when you enslave people, you stop them from learning. They can't move to where their labor is most needed, right? They can't sell, buy and sell in the marketplace mostly. I mean, some of them had little gardens and did a little bit, but not much, right? And so what you do is you take a whole subset of the population, in some cases, over 50% of the state, right? And you limit them from their involvement in the market, which means you lose out. You lose out on their contribution. So there's that. Then if you have a system that is really sees itself as aristocratic, right? And we see this in the famous Roll Jordan Roll book, where he talks about the way that the planters saw themselves as kind of medieval lords of the manor, right? And they were caring for their, they were the paterfamilias, you know, caring for the family. And so they went for a lifestyle that supported what they were doing, but they were not trying to be efficient. They were not trying to maximize profits, particularly.
Rachel:
[17:13] They did some things. They, you know, put cotton together in a way to make the bowls larger. You know, so they did a little bit of innovation, but nothing like what they needed. And you know that because as soon as the Civil War happened—.
Rachel:
[17:27] And ended, they were scrambling to try and have a few factories and build some roads and have some trains. I mean, they just didn't have anything because they didn't need it for their very, very simple economy. And so it was so ridiculous that it gave rise to amazing inefficiencies. So here's an example. Real quickly, I'll just talk about the convict leasing program, which was almost worse than slavery in a way because you could just let people die. You didn't own them as an investment, so you would let them die. But that's a case where it was sort of trumped up crimes. Black men would be used for free labor. And what was interesting there is that they would do stuff like they would have a mine in the South and they would just have like a line of men passing water pails down a line. Like at a time when we'd had the steamboat for a hundred years, like it was the dumbest, most inefficient use, right? But there was no pressure. If you're getting your labor for free, right? There's no pressure to be using it in a more efficient way. So you just see a lot of that coming out. And then therefore, it's no surprise that all of the great economists, you know, who are classical liberals, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, right? All of these guys were saying they were all abolitionists. They were anti-slavery. And they said, it's not only is it immoral because you own your own labor and that's theft of labor, right? Adam Smith, that's written on Adam Smith's grave in Scotland. So not only is it immoral, but it's also inefficient. And so you could condemn it on both counts.
Cody:
[18:56] Yeah. Well, yeah. And it's, it's, it makes sense when you think about it. Cause I think when we think about the old South, we sort of imagine this sort of very pastoral sort of slow moving society, which, which is not what we think of when we think of the industrial revolution that's happening in the North.
Rachel:
[19:09] Right.
Cody:
[19:10] Yeah. And, and yeah, and you, you mentioned just now, and also in the book, you know, economists in the classical liberal tradition who were very opposed to slavery and they were seen obviously very negatively by, by sort of Southern intellectuals. And I think there's the idea of classical liberalism. They call economics the dismal science, these classical liberal economists. Yeah.
Rachel:
[19:33] And it was literally, they used that term because they believed in the equality of all persons. And they saw that as dismal because they were moving in the direction of eugenics, right? The idea that there are superior and inferior humans.
Cody:
[19:46] Yeah. Well, yeah. But when you have a society that refuses to change and allow for flexibility or freedom, then yeah, they're going to stay the same and there's
Cody:
[19:55] not going to be any development. So yeah, it makes total sense. So for those who maybe so far don't have a concrete definition in their mind of capitalism, what is capitalism? Is it profit seeking? Is it exploitation? I mean, if that's the case, then obviously we've had capitalism ever since humans started living together. Or is it something new?
Rachel:
[20:13] Well, I want to say, just so you know, in the book, I use the term free markets or markets. I don't use the term capitalism. And the reason I don't is because of the ambiguity. So some people might roll into the notion of capitalism cronyism, right? Which is me, you know, getting in bed with my senator so that I can have some kind of special, you know, subsidy or regulation or whatever to shut out my competitors. And so we obviously always want to make that distinction. And so in order to make that distinction, I just use the term free markets. And I define it in a couple of ways. And really it's just a way of explaining what caused the great enrichment, right? And so the first is institutional. So you have to have a system that respects private property. You have to have a respect for freedom of contract and you have to have equal protection of the rule of just laws. That is a huge civilizational achievement, by the way. So of course, in any civilization, you're gonna have some of this, right? You're going to have it on some level. But as the civilization matures, at least as I see it as maturity, right, you want to expand the areas within which people can make pairwise exchanges, okay? That's really what you're looking for. And the other one is cultural, and this is McCloskey's point. She says.
Rachel:
[21:30] That you want to have sweet talk about business and entrepreneurship. You need to see that as a vocation, as a valid calling. And that involves understanding what the entrepreneur does, right? Because he is disruptive. And so we have to admit that. We have to admit that the entrepreneur is going to come along and do something better and the other person might go out of business, right? That might be awkward. Nevertheless, overall, we get much, much, much better outcomes if we leave the entrepreneur free to act. And so we had to get to the point where we weren't condemning being a merchant, right? Or being a business person as a low kind of thing because you were breaking up class differences or something like that. And so for quick and dirty, you just want to expand the space for pairwise exchanges between people through your institutions, your legal institutions and your civil society support for business.
Cody:
[22:27] Okay, that's up. There's this observation that you mention in the book that slaveholders are making about their slaves and they say, you know, that they're lazy. They're not capable of hard work without the incentive of the whip. Thus, they must need the whip. And they, of course, they haven't, you know, they hate Adam Smith. They haven't read him. And so they don't realize that people who, you know, can't profit from, you know, what they're doing are not going to be motivated to, you know, do that work.
Cody:
[22:57] There is kind of a flip side of that, I think, though, and this can get us in, I think, more choppy territory if we're not careful about how we talk about it, but this idea that a people for whom profit is no incentive or unlikely to work, does this have relevance in an age of increasingly expanded welfare, talks about basic income, guaranteed basic income, even straight up socialism? And you know what one example here and this is where maybe it's a little bit racial is you talk about how black employment was was much higher than white actually not much higher but higher than white employment after abolition, and then that sort of begins to change after the expansion of government redistribution so there's this argument that redistribution ended up actually being sort of handicapping not just for not just for a lot of black people but also a lot of poor.
Cody:
[23:53] Does government redistribution to poor communities, including many black communities who were historically pushed out of market opportunities, does that actually impair interest in self-improvement?
Rachel:
[24:04] It does. But what I try to tell in the book is a little more nuanced of a story. And so I agree with the traditionally conservative issues with the perverse incentives of the welfare state. I think that's fairly obvious. If anybody's interested in looking into this, just go to benefitscliffs.org and you can actually look at the way that the sudden loss of benefits disincentivizes work and also marriage, actually. It's called the marriage penalty. And so we know that that's true. But what we often don't do is then flip over to some of the other ways that Black flourishing was undermined and eventually.
Rachel:
[24:44] Including the flourishing of other people besides Black Americans. And that is things like a lot of people have heard of redlining, but they don't necessarily know about urban renewal. A lot of people don't know how the highways were constructed, the Federal Highway Act. A lot of people don't know about the way that the unions operated in terms of excluding certain workers in order to artificially raise wages. And so what you see is a destruction of social capital. Okay. So if I run my highway through your neighborhood and scatter you to the four winds, right? If I bring a demo ball to your neighborhood, because I'm going to call it, you know, blighted, right? And I'm going to scatter you to somewhere else, then I also scattered your Main Street, right? I scattered you from your church. I scattered you from the Black Elks Lodge, you know, your fraternal associations, your Black doctor, your Black dentist, et cetera.
Rachel:
[25:43] And so what that does is it undermines without, think of it this way. I always say this, I'm an individualist, but I'm not a hyper-individualist, right? And so what is hyper-individualism? You know, like it's all you, right? You just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But as Christian libertarians, we know that the individual is formed in their family. The family is formed in community, right? It's community between family, business, church, right? Volunteer associations, that's civil society. That's how virtuous individuals are formed. And so when you crush people's social capital and you provide them with perverse incentives to work in marriage, you truly undermine the sorts of habits that lead into flourishing. And so for some reason, the left will talk about highways and urban renewal a lot more than the right. And to me, that makes no sense because it's all massive federal projects, right, of social engineering. I'm like, we should all be talking about this, you know, and showing that what hit the Black community was really, truly devastating at a time when they were doing very, very well. From 48 to 66, you see black poverty cut in half.
Rachel:
[27:03] And that is absolutely, they're riding the economic boom wave out of poverty because they've worked so hard to build great social capital, high levels of education, strong families, etc. And that gets just absolutely chipped away at for the next several decades.
Cody:
[27:18] Yeah, that's helpful. And I think that's bringing together the insights that, the right always wants to do this thing when it comes to race about, you know, take responsibility, pick yourself up by your bootstraps. And the left is always interested in, you know, sort of social or, you know, state causes of racism. And there is some complexity. I remember reading John McWhorter, who he mentioned in the book, his book, Losing the Race. And I liked how he talked about the kind of bringing, bridging those things together, that the one thing that the right sort of misses is that there are historical conditions that have brought us here, right? And so when he talks about, for example, this sort of observable thing that he's noted that a lot of black kids at his time were in... Lacked an interest in education that he saw evinced as much in the whites. He said, you know, well, this is actually a product of the fact that you had black kids in schools who were pushed out and made to feel like they didn't belong. They were, they didn't have a place there. And so there was this, I think, growing response to that, that education was a white thing. Right. And that's sort of an oversimplification, but, but that is part of that story, right? Right. So once you sort of have racism acting in such a way that it's shaping and directing, it becomes very difficult, I think, at that point to course correct. And so individual responsibility is there, but we also can't separate that from what's come before it. Right.
Rachel:
[28:47] Yeah. On your point from McWhorter, which is really interesting, consider, for instance, I mean, this is something I never thought about until I did this research. Desegregation desegregated students, but not teachers. Tens of thousands of black teachers lost their jobs. And then black kids went to schools with white teachers who weren't a part of their culture, didn't understand them, didn't know their parents, didn't have the kind of community connections that they had at their black school, right? And so then, and obviously they're dealing with, in some cases, virulent racism from other members of the school. And so you have a group of people who formerly valued education very, very, very highly. And so to have education be associated with being white, that was not true all the way up through the 1960s. That was simply not true. So McWhorter's got a good point there about what probably happened.
Cody:
[29:44] Yeah, no, and you mentioned, I mean, that what you just expressed was, I remember reading that in Zora Neale Hurston, that she had this, something we'd look back on now and think it was very controversial viewpoint. But her critique of Brown versus Board of Education was, okay, so what's happening now to these black teachers? They're going to be replaced, they're going to be pushed out, we're going to start forcing the black and white students to come together, but in a context where whites have the upper hand, whites are the teachers, whites are the administrators. And that's actually not for the best interest of black kids. I think you mentioned in the book, one aspect of that ruling, was this idea that blacks can't succeed unless whites are around them, that blacks can't learn unless whites are there with them. And that's incorrect, right? Obviously.
Rachel:
[30:27] Well, and Zora Neale Hurston, this is really interesting, and this is true of TRM Howard, too. They were from towns that were all black. They were from Friedman's towns. And so Zora Neale Hurston's dad was the mayor, right? So to her, Black people can do whatever they want to do. They can do all the jobs, right? They don't need white people to function well. And so she came in with a kind of confidence, right? And you hear her in that great line about discrimination where she says, I don't understand why you would, discriminate against me. I'm so fabulous. I'm so great. She had so much confidence. And so it was frustrating to her that the message was, is, oh, well, you'll get a better education as long as you've got a white kid sitting next to you. What?
Cody:
[31:11] Yeah, that's fascinating. Well, so, okay, so slavery is abolished. What happens to Black Americans economically after slavery? Do they kind of struggle along or not? What happens there?
Rachel:
[31:24] Yeah, really. So this is Competition and Coercion by Bob Higgs, huge resource for me. And of course, he's the author also of Crisis and Leviathan, which is a major classic, and a Christian himself later in life, which is cool. But Bob Higgs goes over this whole story. And basically what he tells us is that what Black people really wanted was their own farms. The 40 acres and a mule thing got killed really fast. That only lasted about nine months.
Rachel:
[31:53] Jackson, Johnson, Andrew Johnson, shut it down. Okay. And so there, if you were able to acquire any land, it really wasn't going to be respected by the courts. And so that was a major problem as well. And so even though the desperate desire of like all of the freedmen was to have their own land, they ended up having to go into sharecropping where they're working for a white owner. And their sharecropping was preferable to them over wage earning because wage earning was more like being a slave again, right? You'd have a foreman cracking the whip. If you were a share cropper and you were just in charge of your part of the land, you could at least feel that you were kind of running the show and then you got whatever percentage. Now, here's where it gets interesting.
Rachel:
[32:41] Because of the freedom of movement, the one form of freedom that they actually really could take a hold of after emancipation, they were able to bargain, right? They were able to say, hey, I'll go over to Mr. Jones Farm, right? I'll leave and go to the Delta, you know, et cetera. And so they were able to say, no, I don't want 20%. I want 50%, right? So they slowly but surely pushed their percentage up in their sharecropping deals. And what you saw was even though Black Americans, of course, are starting way behind, way, way, way behind. You actually see the black economy grow at three times the pace of the white economy, which means that they were catching up in the post-emancipation period. And of course, some of the reconstruction courts helped with that, right? By actually defending their property rights.
Cody:
[33:33] Well, and there's a whole other kind of, And insofar as they were looking for, there was competition amongst, you know, who you could work for. You started to see these sharecroppers that were colluding, right, to try to fix wages. And then, of course, you know, without a government there to force that monopoly or that collusion together, you end up having competition that they're breaking these agreements to collude. And then, right. So that's kind of fascinating, too.
Rachel:
[34:00] Yes, the perfect example of how cartels are unstable inherently.
Cody:
[34:06] Absolutely. Well, so, and you have obviously a very disturbing chapter about lynching, which, as I read it, brought to mind the theologian James Cone's book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. But one major story in that section was about the Tulsa riot. And that's been highlighted in recent years as one of those, you know, why did we never learn about this in school? It must be because our schools are systemically racist, some kind of things. And I don't remember hearing about this story in high school myself, but I certainly read about, you know, lynching and Jim Crow and bombings of black churches and the struggles of the civil rights movement. Do you think that the topic of injustice against black Americans is a topic that our schools and public discourse are covering adequately or not nearly enough? Do you feel like it's one of those things that we're not really talking about because society is systemically racist or is it something we're obsessed with or is it somewhere in the middle? Yeah.
Rachel:
[34:58] Well, it kind of depends on which period in history you're talking about. And so my co-author, Marcus Witcher, is a historian. I'm a philosopher. And so he focused on chapter four and chapter six, where you have a lot of really detailed stories. And I think what he would say, his frustration as a history professor, is that there was this sense of slavery and emancipation, then like separate water fountains and Martin Luther King Jr. You know what I mean? and nobody had anything in between, right? And so you don't realize that there's actually this long story of civil rights, where you're building up the NAACP, you're building up legal rights, you've got various cases in play. Booker T. Washington is building up the business community. Madam C.J. Walker is investing in the legal cases, et cetera, right? And so there's a lot going on from like 1880 to 1950 before you have the full-fledged civil rights movement. And so part of what we wanted to do was tell that longer story, a lot of which has to do with the role of business people, right? I mean, John H. Johnson at Ebony and Jet Magazine is one of the best examples because he publishes the pictures of Emmett Till in his coffin, which is just a huge turning point for the whole country. When it came to civil rights. And so you want to fill that in. Now, of course, you could argue that we've gone the other way, right? In very, very recent years, where now it's all about all of the atrocities.
Rachel:
[36:25] And then you can make kind of a different complaint, which is you're telling me about atrocities and you're telling me about politics, but you're not telling me anything about business people. You're not telling me anything about the black church. You're not talking about fraternal associations. You know what I mean? You're not giving me the thick civil society institutions, the huge jump forward in literacy that was accomplished through the Rosenwald schools and all sorts of Sunday schools and things like that. And so I think it all depends. It all depends. Right. I don't think we've ever gotten it right. I wish that we would talk about these things, but that we would also tell the more the positive stories of of people creating workarounds and succeeding, quote unquote, in spite of because what it gave us were some of the greatest, American accomplishments of all time. I mean, I think, I think Douglas's autobiography is one of the greatest books in the American canon. You know, I think our leap forward in literacy was probably the greatest leap forward in the history of the world thus far. You know, I think Black American music, which comes out of the Black church, is the only music the entire world listens to. You know, I mean, there's a lot we can say that isn't just a story of oppression and the system is against you and those sorts of messages that might tell young people, you know, don't bother trying. And that's really, I think, the fear of a lot of black conservatives.
Cody:
[37:44] Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. So we went from it being a period of time that we didn't talk about to a period of time where we only sort of talk about the martyrologies. We only talk about the ways in which racism held people down. We didn't talk about the ways in which people triumphed despite it. Right.
Cody:
[38:00] Yes. Well, I could imagine, though, you know, some listeners being willing to grant this proposition that state action has been responsible for a lot of the harm that's come to black Americans, you know, lynchings and other kinds of serious discrimination also thrived outside of the law. So is it simplistic to say that less government is the key to black liberation? Or, and I'm not saying you're saying that, but I'm wondering if someone who's listening would be thinking that that's what we're saying.
Rachel:
[38:25] Yeah. I mean, actually, Bob Higgs addresses this as well when he takes on Gary Becker. And he says, look, Gary Becker is right that you have to pay to discriminate. It's going to cost you. But he said, but some people are racist enough to pay. They'll pay. They'll pay the price. Right. And so let's not oversimplify it. At the same time, we don't want to forget the way that police often cooperated with this kind of thing. Right. And so they wouldn't stop it. Sometimes they participated in it. Oftentimes when there were riots, for instance, police just stood back and did nothing or they did for several days before they actually took action. And, you know, and so that point about the equal protection of the rule of just laws, that's a, you know, I don't want to step on the toes of the anarcho-capitalists here, but let's just say that, you know, that's a positive duty of the state and it's something that was not done. You know, you don't effectively have those rights if no one is willing to enforce them. And so definitely both. But, yes, I think we need to take the actual racism very seriously. But as I was saying at the beginning of the podcast I think that you also want to reflect on the fact.
Rachel:
[39:39] That it was very much stoked in many ways. The eugenics movement, you know, was putting this stuff into basic economics textbooks. You know, redlining was separating neighborhoods that had already started integrating, you know, or you had a black street next to a Polish street next to an Italian street. And they're saying, no, no, no, these people can't live together because it's not possible that they could live in peace. It was very social engineering mindset. And so a lot of the ways in which we might have organically emerged from our racist habits were actually kept back through municipal and state laws. And you see that with white supremacy in the late 19th century. And so it's not as though white people could just walk around and be superior. They had to pass a bunch of laws telling you you couldn't sell to blacks and you couldn't buy from blacks and you weren't allowed to build there and you weren't allowed to sell that house to blacks, Right. Or whatever it was. And so it took a lot of artificial, you know, kind of, you know, insertion of the law in order to stop some of those organic things from from developing.
Cody:
[40:48] Well, as we're talking about these, you know, what kind of what's happening, on the on the culture side. There's a lot of white panic in that period about black Americans in the early 20th century that blacks are dangerous criminals, they're a threat to racial purity, they're sex-crazed rapists, they're lazy, but they're also going to steal our jobs. And it seems that a lot of these talking points have been recycled and a lot of the recent discourse about immigration that the same kinds – and actually, incidentally, a lot of the same critiques about immigrants in the past, Italian immigrants and Irish immigrants, that we're seeing some of those concerns. So what is your take on the longevity of those kinds of stereotypes?
Rachel:
[41:26] Oh, what a great question. Well, let me say this. I think that the rise of, there's a great book, by the way, called something like Reviving Classical Liberalism Against Populism. That's the name of it. I can't remember the author, but I reviewed it for Acton. And in that book, he explains that populist movements are a fear reaction to sudden cultural shifts. Yeah. They're always authoritarian in nature, but other than that, there's not really a philosophy, right? There's no political philosophy of populism.
Rachel:
[41:58] It's kind of an instinctual sort of response. And so I do think that, it will always be the case that people will panic when there is a sudden enough shift or a shift that is large enough in size, or I might say pumped up enough in the media, right? I mean, that's the debate, you know, because I think the Europeans are dealing with influxes of immigrants that in some cases can be genuinely overwhelming to their systems. Americans, I don't think so, but we're sort of relating to the Europeans maybe or over relating in that sense. But I do think that you have to expect that, right? And this is a place where maybe libertarians and classical liberals, you've got a little bit of a difference in.
Rachel:
[42:45] Emphasis or something there because, you know, a classical liberal who has a little bit more wiggle room in terms of their perspective of what the state is going to be doing might say to the very strict libertarian, look, you may need to control the influx, right, so that it doesn't happen so suddenly or so overwhelmingly that people are just going to react. And then you end up with a less libertarian outcome because then people really want to bring the hammer down because they're afraid of chaos. Right. And obviously, that's always a gamble because you're giving the state some power. But even somebody like Mike Munger, who's a great hero, you know, of the libertarian movement at Duke and has run for office many, many times, he said, look, over time, I just realized, to be politically viable, you have to say a high gate and a wide door, right? Let's make sure that the border is secure, but let's make it a heck of a lot easier for the people we want to be here to be here and just to have their status in a very clear way and fast and not expensive, right? And that sort of thing. And so, I think we do have to be in reality about people's fear responses, we do.
Cody:
[43:56] No, yeah, I think that that's true. Obviously, we have to take those concerns seriously. I do think, it's interesting, I've been talking to more kind of libertarians and classical liberals in Europe, and the way that they sort of center immigration in a way that a lot of American libertarians don't, as a concern. And when I'll sort of talk to them about it, I'll say, yeah, but, you know, don't you feel like if you didn't have a state that sort of said everybody can come, but nobody can work because we don't want to take away jobs from the natives. And so we're going to have all these sort of young men who are not working, who are just walking the streets. You're not really integrating into society because we don't want you to do that. If we weren't doing that, maybe it would work a lot better. And they said, oh, yeah, 100 percent, it would work a lot better.
Rachel:
[44:38] Right.
Cody:
[44:39] Yeah. So that's interesting. OK, so I want to be respectful of the time. And we'll ask a couple more questions. So when one goes back to the time prior to the welfare state, one will see the importance of voluntary societies to help the poor and organize. And so this is something that's been covered in other books as well, the existence of voluntary societies and how they sort of did some of the things that the welfare state does now. But how did voluntary and fraternal organizations help in the cause of black rights specifically?
Rachel:
[45:09] Oh, yeah. So this is really huge. And I actually, I really want the listeners to hear what I'm saying. In many ways, Black Americans had thicker civil society institutions than white Americans because they had to, right? And it all starts with the Black church, you know, which just so people know, there's a lot of confusion about this. You know, we hear about things like the white man's religion, right? Christianity being the white man's religion. But it's important to understand that slave masters generally did not evangelize their slaves. They knew that that would give them an argument for freedom. And so they didn't want to do it. And many of them were kind of unchurched Anglicans, you know, and I'm nothing against Anglicans in general, but I just think they weren't that zealous, you know, in their Christianity. And so that's not actually how many Black Americans became Christians. They became Christians the same way a lot of white Americans did, which was through the big tent revivals, right? Through the big revival movements. And then they would go back to their plantations and evangelize their fellows. And so when they used the term white man's religion, what they were often talking about was the kind of lackadaisical Christianity of the master, or even the way that the master would control the preachers, the missionaries that came onto the plantations and say, well, you preach to them about sealing and obedience and things like that. But don't say anything about Jesus or salvation or definitely not the book of Exodus. Right.
Rachel:
[46:38] So, you know, so so I want to make that really clear. And then what that creates then is the black church as a space in which black leadership is actually incredibly powerful. It's a place where white people have no say. And so what happens is kind of everything migrates to the black church. So you're doing politics at church. You're doing art at church. You're learning how to read at church. You're having your knitting circle at church. It becomes like the safe space, I guess you could say. And then as time progresses, you start to see the rise of the National Negro Business Network, right? You start to see the rise of the lodges, you know, the fraternal associations, which served as a kind of insurance. It's very helpful for, you know, hey, we'll cover the burial if you die for your family. Or if you get sick, we'll keep you covered, you know.
Rachel:
[47:24] For your family while you're sick or whatever. And so many of those, what we have to understand is that they weren't just serving their direct purpose. They were also serving a lot of indirect purposes, right? And this is true of all civil society institutions. It can be there for, you know, insurance, but you know, they're all getting together and getting to know each other and going into business and giving each other no interest loans and getting each other jobs because that's how it works, right? And so for many of us who, you know, we got our first job through our uncle or whatever, we understand the value of those networks. Once that all is really crushed after the 1960s, I don't want to say all, but so much of it was crushed after the 1960s, then you end up getting a terrible kind of isolation. And so I refer to a lot of the poverty we see in the United States as network poverty. It's not necessarily that people don't have access to material goods, right? But they are isolated. They're separated from the sort of things like employment networks that are going to get you to kind of a flourishing state where you feel good because you feel that you're contributing. And not contributing can be incredibly, incredibly depressing. And so when we look at the welfare state saying, well, hey, we made you, we lifted you above the poverty line because we gave you cash. Guys, like, great. I'm glad that people have cash, but if you don't have a job, you're still depressed. Yeah.
Rachel:
[48:51] You're still sitting in your house aimless with a feeling of no purpose. And so not only have you not actually lifted them above poverty in a meaningful sense, but you may have even undermined the process of moving away from a very dilapidated kind of way of life. And so, yeah, I mean, that kind of thing can be incredibly destructive. And I just cannot overstate the importance of particularly Christian libertarians, I think.
Rachel:
[49:17] Of focusing on and investing in civil society solutions so that when we critique the state, we can go, and here's how it should look, right, with things like non-toxic charity. You know, look up an organization like True Cherry, right? How do you do it right so that people's lives are actually being transformed and you're not just helping them survive, but you're actually helping them thrive?
Cody:
[49:44] That's good. And as you're describing that, it's interesting because- It's it's the left in this case that is becoming hyper individualistic that says sort of if I help I give you as an individual money, you have what you need. Right. And so now you've undermined all those social connections and all those things, those community connections. And then the community is is no longer the community. It's the state. Right. And so it's individuals in the state, not these sort of webs of relationships. And yeah, as you said, it hasn't gone away completely. Certainly, the wealthy still maintain their connections, right? You know, if the frat boy gets found with cocaine or something like that, his dad still plays golf with the judge and he'll help him out.
Rachel:
[50:29] Yep.
Cody:
[50:30] But yeah, but it's what we've lost it amongst, largely lost it amongst working class people in a pretty significant way.
Rachel:
[50:36] And because we're in such a unique moment, I mean, this is modernity, right? Modernity and the ability even to be wealthy enough to not need, you know, our close connections, not be sort of forced, so to speak, into our close connections. I think that we do need to be really creative and it should come from the church. The church should be incredibly creative when it comes to coming up with ways to invite people to have a place where community is naturally forming.
Cody:
[51:05] Well, Rachel, I've got a whole list of questions I haven't asked you. And that wasn't even everything I could have asked you. So we especially didn't talk about, and we talked about a little bit, I guess, is policy changes and things we can practically do to make things better. And we talked a little bit about historical diagnosis, but we could even talk more about that. So I really want people to get a hold of the book. So I'm hoping that people, I've said, okay, there's got to be a lot more here that we can talk about. And there is. And so I hope that they're intrigued by the conversation. I hope they'll check out the book. And other than that, I probably should, we probably should wrap up because I know you've got a deadline and I've got a deadline too. So I want to thank you again. The name of the book is Black Liberation Through the Marketplace. And where can people find you? Should I try to put your social media links, stuff like that?
Rachel:
[51:48] Yeah, so Amazon for the book. I'm at rachelferguson.com. And you can connect with me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I'm at Liberty Ethics on Twitter and Instagram.
Cody:
[51:58] Awesome. Rachel, thank you so much. I'm making a note of here so I can make sure I include that in the end. In the show notes, people can check that stuff out. And thank you again for making this time. Really glad that we finally got you on a Libertarian Christian podcast episode.
Rachel:
[52:10] Yeah, and I'd love to come back and do the rest of your questions anytime.
Cody:
[52:13] Yeah, well, and I definitely want to talk to you about the next book whenever that's done. Okay, great. All right, thank you, Rachel.
Norman Horn:
[52:19] Thank you for listening to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast. If you liked today's episode, we encourage you to rate us on Apple Podcasts to help expand our audience. If you want to reach out to us, email us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com. You can also reach us @Lciofficial on Twitter. And of course we are on Facebook and have an active group you are welcome to join. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Katherine Williams:
[52:43] The Libertarian Christian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute, a registered 501(c)3 non-profit. If you'd like to find out more about LCI, visit us on the web, at LibertarianChristians.com. The voiceovers are by Matt Bellis and Katherine Williams. As of Episode 115, our audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out at Podsworth.com.