Rachel Ferguson, Ph.D.

Oct 28

Exclusion & Opportunity -

Black Liberation Through the Marketplace

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

Themes we discuss include

Racism and exclusion from justice, property, and rule of law
Classical Liberalism
Property Rights
Freedom of Contract
Education
History of Injustices post Civil War
Convict Leasing
Lynching
Jim Crow
Progressivism
Eugenics
Sterilization
Minimum Wage and its racist and eugenic underpinnings
Urban Renewal
Highways, transportation and the breakdown of African American and ethnic communities
Eminent Domain
African American towns and civil society
1619 Project and its errors
Family and the Sexual Revolution
Contraception
Entrepreneurship
Civil Society
Alexis de Tocqueville
Applied economics
Criminal Justice reform
Black Churches as a central part of community
Decentralization, Associational Life, and Welfare before the Welfare State

We discuss a number of writers including

Fredrick Douglass
Zora Neale Hurston
Booker T. Washington
Malcom X
Friedrich Hayek
Anthony Bradley

Biography

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

Rachel Ferguson Website