 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato and editor of libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Today, we're talking about African Americans, libertarianism, and the state. Joining us is Jonathan Blanks, a research associate in the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. This may seem like a silly and kind of obvious first question, but the state generally hasn't been too kind to black people, has it? I mean, there's the obvious monstrosity of slavery, but it certainly didn't stop there. No, no, no. There's a long history of blacks in the state not working very well together. I mean, you have it started with the Constitution and the implicit recognition with the three fifths compromise. And then you have the Supreme Court decisions like Dred Scott, where Judge Tawny said, Justice Tawny said, there's no rights that the white man should respect of a black man. And during slavery, you had stuff like the Future of Slave Act, which not only affected slaves, black people in the South that are enslaved, but also blacks in the North that would either escape or were born free, but still could be kidnapped and had a hard time proving their freedom, which was obviously put in the most recent, the recent film, 12 Years a Slave. Then after the Civil War, you have Reconstruction. South fights back against that, but eventually it goes away with the Republican compromise that brought in Rutherford B. Hayes, and you had basically all of the rights that had been given to blacks through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments basically completely stripped away. Blacks in government were removed, some through democratic means, some through basically coups d'etat. You had black people couldn't sit on juries. They couldn't testify against white people. You had state-sponsored terrorism, where essentially police officers were often the people who were leading in the Klan. They would meet out their own type of justice, whether or not they used the courts or not, which were generally stacked against them anyway. Then, of course, you also have the beginning of police brutality, which, of course, lives through this day. Allowing lynchings to happen, another one. Well, yeah, allowing lynching to happen, or leading the lynch parties often. When you read a lot about the lynchings, you're like, oh, the investigation never happened. Well, a lot of the reason why the investigation never happened is because they were there. They knew what was going on. Oh, I'll leave the keys right here, gentlemen, and I'll step out. Yeah, exactly. And then you also had less reported stuff like the convict lease program, where you had, of course, the Southern economy was depressed after the war. So a lot of people went to work for sharecropping, and they would hopefully get as much as they had earned. But a lot of times, they were basically living on a substance level. Well, during the same time, they passed a lot of like vagrancy laws. And while on the books, it looks like a colorblind law, what essentially happened was, it's like, oh, if you're black and without a job, they're going to throw you in jail. Then make you work. Yeah. And they would make you work, and they would basically sell you back into corporate slavery, where you had people in the South that arrested for vagrancy, and then they couldn't pay their fine to get out. And they're like, well, now you're going to do a year, and then now you're in prison. Oh, well, we need labor in the North. So hey, how about you go work in this mine? And then these are untold stories of hundreds of people who were assumed to be criminals, because they went into the criminal justice system. But then eventually, we're essentially just jobless in the South, and there was not a whole lot they could do. And this targeted chiefly blacks, or was it that, or did it target, say, poor whites and jobless whites as well? It was chiefly used against blacks. I think most of the time, when you had a white person picked up for vagrancy, it was going to be something like public drunkenness, and they'd be basically let out. Oh, yeah. The big weapon for sheriffs and anyone in state positions was just discretionary enforcement of all these things. These laws were not really meant to be applied to white people, and we never applied them to white people. They're just applied to black people. Very bad. And then, of course, they got codified more with Jim Crow laws, which were then put in place with the Pussy B. Ferguson case, too. And then it got even worse and worse and worse. Yeah, absolutely. And it just became this point where you have black people that were shut out of labor markets, shut out of, you can't eat at the lunch counties. You can't go into the front of stores. I mean, this long, all states supported racism. Then you have just weird things that happened, like federal recognition of segregation. You had it in the South, and it was basically when Hayes came in and Reconstruction ended, I think it's fair to say that the Republican Party and the federal government just kind of turned their back to the South and let the South do what they wanted to do. Absolutely. But as the 20th century came in, you actually started to have federal recognition of segregation. For example, there are twice as many bathrooms as are needed in the Pentagon because they built it in Jim Crow, Virginia, and they couldn't have the same bathroom. So, of course, the government is spending millions of dollars unnecessarily because they recognized Virginia state law, which is absolutely against the Constitution. Even earlier, you have black troops returning home from who fought in World War II, who had to get in the back of the train while German POWs were able to sit up front in basic luxury cars. Well, it wasn't even the integrating of the military that Truman did too. Exactly. So, the military itself worked on segregated levels up until 1948, I believe, it was the year. Yeah. And so, then, of course, you have the civil rights era, and things get a lot better. You know, the segregation has struck down, Jim Crow dies. And we expect, you would hope, looking back at everything, you know, everything's jolly, but of course, that's not what happened. In the 70s, you have Nixon's persecution of the drug war. Now, keep in mind, when he started it up, it was like supposed to be, you know, equal enforcement and treatment, although he sold it as a tough-on-crime thing. That, of course, exploded under Reagan, and we have these massive incarceration problems, you know, the interstates became war zones because of the crack epidemic. And, you know, again, this is all basically state-driven through the prohibition. Oddly enough. The sentencing disparity too, yeah. Sentencing disparities. Although, funny thing about that is you had, you know, part of that was actually supposed, was supported by the Congressional Black Caucus. You know, they saw crack as a black problem, and so they're like, well, we want to show that we're helping, you know, our black communities that are devastated by this. And so, we're going to support this 101. What did these sentencing disparities look like? The crack to powder disparity was basically you would get five years in prison for five grams of crack cocaine that you would get for 500 grams of powder cocaine. But because powder cocaine is more expensive and typically more associated with white people, then crack would get, was this demon drug that was destroying the cities and, you know, the crack babies and everything that was going on, which turned out later to be mostly made up. I mean, it was, you know, it was paranoid. I mean, there were obviously health problems. Well, yeah, I mean, it's always been that way with drug scares, you know, like reefer madness back in the 30s and the hilarious and terrible movie at the same time. But so, yeah, it was, it's a lot of times when this, these sort of racially disparate impact happened not to necessarily use the legal term, but that it's sometimes made from good intentions. I mean, again, there's no reason to think that the Congressional Black Caucus really wanted to lock up, you know, 600,000, you know, African-Americans on nonviolent drug charges. But, you know, here we are. You also have other things like the birth of SWAT, if you read Radley Balco's book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, a lot of this is tied to Daryl Gates and the LAPD and his fight against the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers and also the Riots at the time. Yeah, the Riots of the time. And which is funny, one other thing about the Black Panthers, obviously, I'm not supporting the organization, but they had, they did have a lot of like community-based, you know, aid programs. And they, one of the things they wanted to do was create their own patrols because they didn't trust the police because, again, of the brutality issues and corruption and that sort of thing. But what you would consider to be completely opposite now, you had a Republican governor and Ronald Reagan, you know, pushing for gun control because we can't have these militant Black people exercising their Second Amendment riots on our streets. And you get into the 80s and 90s, you know, you've got the Rodney King beating, which, again, triggers the nonviolent, the not guilty verdict triggered, you know, the riots. And it just, the frustration with the state has always been there. And now we have mass incarceration on a level that hasn't been seen with the entirely, which creates disenfranchisement and almost a generation of African American males who are serving time in jail, which means that they have, for usually nonviolent offenses, which means that they have less employment prospects going forward. It all just kind of adds up, but it's been adding up for hundreds of years. Yeah, hundreds of years. But with the sentencing disparity, a lot of these people are coming out now, and there have been some studies showing that because so much of America is still geographically segregated that a lot of these people are going to come back to these same neighborhoods that, you know, that are already economically depressed. Blacks already have a higher unemployment rate than the general population and certainly whites. And if you have a large number, like six thousand people a week, I think, come out of incarceration into these neighborhoods that are already economically depressed, they have lower job prospects. What are we going to do about all of them? Yes, that's a good point. I think a lot of people don't appreciate just how bad the criminal justice system is in the way it treats black Americans. So we've talked a little bit about, you know, sentencing disparities and whatnot, but what are some of the other ways that the criminal justice system is harmful or stacked against? Well, I mean, just like your day-to-day contact with black people, you're going to see like a New York City stop-and-frisk program that Bill de Blasio has finally started to address. There was a federal injunction saying they needed to start having monitors and all that because over the course of, you know, they stopped four million people over the course of like ten years. So what is stop-and-frisk? Oh, stop-and-frisk is basically a program that was billed as an anti-gun measure. Basically, there's a case called Terry v. Ohio in which a cop stopped some people who were kind of lingering around a convenience store, I believe, and he looked like they were casing the joint. So he went up to them and searched them for weapons, found weapons that they had been planning to rob this place. And the Supreme Court said that's okay because he was, he's an experienced police officer. They looked like they were about to commit a crime and for his own safety he checked for weapons. So stop-and-frisk is a much broader program to stop the carrying of weapons and therefore crime prevention method in New York City and other places that basically gives carte blanche to the police to just, if as long as they have an articulable suspicion that a crime is about to be committed, they can pat someone down for weapons. The problem is over the ten years that they were doing this program that there were about four million stops over 80% of which sometimes 89% in any given year were totally innocent. No, no guns, no drugs, no past citations, no outstanding warrants. I think it was higher than 80%, wasn't it? I mean it was incredibly low. Well, I mean, as far, a lot of these people had, you know they could get civil citations for carrying marijuana or they could, you know, they had a past warrant or they had something, some outstanding, like they, you know, they owe child support or something like that. So you break it down by year, it starts off around 82% and then it gets up to... But the guns, the guns are pretty low. Oh, the guns were absolutely ridiculous. So you have this, this anti-gun program out of four million stops. They found about 8,000 guns. 8,000 guns is a lot of guns, but it's two tenths of one percent of the amount of stops that they were doing. So with this, you say they need the articulable suspicion, does this mean that they were coming up with suspicion to articulate after the fact in many cases, that they probably didn't have anything at all or were these people, I mean, is there a sense that these people were legitimately acting, say, suspicious and it just turned out that... Well, generally with the criminal justice system, people are going to believe cops over here, average citizen, no matter what color they are, but particularly given the history and like the stereotypes against black people, you're going to have that. A lot of these, part of when the injunction was written, there were a lot of insufficient documentation that they couldn't really put a reason why they did it. And in one year, they stopped more young black males in New York City than live in New York City. So you're stopping people multiple times and they've shown that they've basically camping outside of neighborhoods and just searching guys six, seven times. And these are like students that are going to school and so no, a lot of times I think they were either making it up or they're just like, well, he was nervous around a police officer. Oh, I wonder why, but that's a good enough reason for them. And it seems, I mean, the problem beyond the fact that you only find 8,000 guns out of 4 million stops, which, I mean, if nothing else seems like a colossal waste of police resources, but it's also, I mean, the environment this must create if you're a kid who's going about your daily business but getting stopped several times a day and not just the cops aren't just talking to you, but they're actually, I mean, they're putting you up against the wall and patting you down. I mean, this has got to be pretty psychologically destructive. Well, absolutely. Even in the Terry decision, there is a footnote in which the judge cited the justice cited a law enforcement critique that's saying in minority communities, stop and frisk, not based on articulable suspicion creates a lot of resentment and you can understand why. And so if young blacks have so much contact with police if they're just kind of hanging out, being kids, you know, it's like, what are you doing here? Things that a lot of other people don't have to do. Yeah, white kids get hit with it too, but it is so much more prevalent, so much more hostile. And it creates a resentment and like a society that just doesn't want you. And I think that that's a good, that's a point in general because you start to get these neighborhoods to feel like the police are an occupying force and this basic disconnection between the government and you that they come in and they're not us, they're them, the white government who comes in and treats us very poorly, which is a general, I think, trend in a lot of the ways that African Americans have dealt with the state. I mean, they're treating them like they're occupying Fallujah or something, you know, checkpoint we're gonna check you out here. It doesn't help for community policing. It doesn't help to solve crimes, to have anyone actually come forward and say, hey, I'll help you out because the police are friends. It really destroys that tie between the people in the state in a way that I think, again, going back to the general topic, African Americans feel that and have felt that for a long time, that the state is them, it's not us. Yeah, and I think also like general society. I mean, it's just, I don't think they're thinking, oh, it's this police department that's doing it. It's like, you see so many people around you going away to prison, coming back, not being able to get a job, you're getting followed in the mall by cops of security. You get shaken down when you're just like trying to go to a movie in your own hometown. I mean, how, it's so alienating and it's just really difficult to see when people are like, well, you know, why were those kids doing that in the first place? Why are the cops like just harassing people? And so I think it really reduces the buy-in to the American dream that we all kind of want and kind of aspire to when you just have agents of the state you know, making lives miserable for basically no reason. Let's go back and talk about some other things that have created that distance, I think that a lot of people don't know about in terms of policies that had extreme racial or racist origins to them or were enforced in a racially disparate way. One of them, a big one is gun control, which more and more people I think are realizing there's a couple of books that came out recently both talking about the importance of guns for civil rights, but especially KKK, gun control, gun confiscation organization really, right? Yeah, essentially, I mean, one of the first things that after the war, one of the first things that the South did before like fully implemented reconstruction was try to disarm the newly freed blacks because a lot of these ex-slaves had guns for hunting because they were allowed to do that because they could forge for their own food on their days off. And part of the reason that we passed the 14th Amendment was in fact protect the gun rights of the freedmen, but throughout the history since then, you have, again, you're talking about the Klan would try to take the guns from freedmen, the governments would try to strip blacks of their rights. It was... Well, another good one is the May issue, we're talking about discretion, the May issue license permitting that they have, which is you have to demonstrate to some government officially you need a gun permit. There's a case from 1941, a Florida case where they say, well, everyone knows this law was passed to not apply to white people. The sheriff in his discretion just could deny black people having guns, but that never happens to white people. Right, I mean, it does today. You basically have to be a celebrity to get a carry permit in New York, but in places like New York. But take, for example, Martin Luther King. I mean, he was, he didn't believe in political violence, but he was not against self-defense or defense of his family. He applied for one of these May issue permits and he was denied. And of course, that was racially based. The South is famous for its love of guns. And I obviously have no problem with that, but the problem is when it is selectively enforced, it's going to have an impact on the people who that is being enforced against. I think this is a broader problem that a lot of people don't appreciate with when you have discretion baked into laws. So we say things like, well, this law looks like, I mean, this law looks like it applies to everybody, but if there's any discretionary angle on it, then that discretion, I mean, the discretion may be used legitimately in a lot of cases, but if there are prejudices that the person with the discretionary power holds or there are racism or other forms of bigotry are in existence, then the discretion's going to start aligning with those things. And so a law that looks perfectly fine on its face on the ground is going to have really pernicious effects and be used illegitimately. But the problem I think that a lot of us face when we're talking about things like the experience of poor blacks in this country is that we don't see it. Like we don't see that effect and that the people that it's happening to are often not in a position to make their plight known. They don't have, they don't have access to. And they don't even have the ability to get that discretion reviewed at all at the time. Well, absolutely. And I mean, this is basically one of the major problems with the drug war. Whites and blacks use drugs at roughly the same rate. Dave Weigel, I think, wrote about this recently where he was at a party with a lot of DC journalist writer types. And there was marijuana there. And there is literally no fear for them to openly use in their homes in Northwest with, the cops are not coming to bust down the stores. Northwest DC is what he means, like more gentrified area. Now, if you go to Anacostia where DC professionals say, don't ever go there because that's where the, I mean, essentially, because that's where black people are and that's where the violence, most of the city violence is. Well, that's where the drug war is fought. And for doing the same thing, white professionals in DC can get, will land you jail time in Southeast. And of course, that's where you're going to have your SWAT style raids where you have police officers in full military gear. As you said, like they're in Fallujah, kicking down doors, holding semi-automatic weapons to people's heads, keeping them on the ground for with no expectation of violence going in. It's just, that's just how drug warrants are served now. And this has been able to grow because we have this, like the crime rate in the 1980s just got everyone. So like worked out crime is a number one public policy problem. So you had a lot of sort of white voters being scared that, oh no, our crime rate is going up and we need to do something about it. We need to put resources and effort into more policing, more aggressive policing. And so they provide the incentive for the government to ramp up all this, but they don't feel the effects of it, what that looks like on the ground with the tanks, with the automatic weapons. It's because it's exploding all over the country now because of the Pentagon subsidizing the militarization of all these units. More people are starting to see it because, also because of like cell phones on this. Tim had a great briefing yesterday where he was talking about. Tim Lynch. Yeah, Tim Lynch about the expansion of cell phones and people can record what's going on where and it is now affecting white homes and now people are starting to get upset about it because you have people who are absolutely, a lot of times because these are wrong door rates that get bad information, there are perfectly innocent. Their dogs are shot, like Mayor Che Calvo over in Maryland had his two dogs shot and he was tied to it. His, I think it was his wife and his mother-in-law were tied to a chair while their dogs bled to death on their floor and questioned about a DHL package that was sent to their house full of marijuana that they did not order. And I think when you have people that are able to see what this enforcement looks like, you're now seeing more backlash against it. But more white people taking notice possibly. Indeed. Some other policies that have hurt African-Americans disproportionately. What's another good example? I think that definitely minimum wage gets some attention on that level. The thing is with the CBO recently put out a report about if we, up the minimum wage to 1010, we have a lot of people would benefit. They would pull up wages on a large scale, but that we would probably have a net job loss of $500,000. I mean, 500,000 people would lose their jobs and they would not be replaced. I'm not an economist, but I look at this and I'm thinking, okay, where is this going to hit the hardest because the unemployment rate is already higher among blacks and minorities. And if you have 500,000 job losses, who is that likely going to hit more? I don't have the data to support that. But certainly in the past, during the New Deal, when they were raising minimum wages, it priced unskilled blacks out of jobs. And this was pushed by unions because unions used to be exclusive to whites. Incredibly racist, yes. And while they've certainly amended for that, their policies still affect people the way that they were originally intended to. Well, the Fair Labor Standards Act in the first federal minimum wage, there is good evidence that a lot of people, particularly in Ohio, representatives of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, that was where the great migration was occurring of blacks trying to get out of the South because it wasn't very nice down there. And then they were coming up north and they were undercutting white people for jobs. And this often comes as people say, oh, are you saying that black people are worth less in the labor market? Well, no, it's actually that if someone is racist and you're trying to get them to hire you, sometimes the only way you can do that is to actually give them a lower cost for you. It's bad that they're racist, but you can have a job if you undercut someone else in the same work. So there is a lot of racism originally behind the minimum wage and unions and Davis-Bacon and all these things to control wages which really disproportionately hurt African-Americans. Yeah, absolutely. Another area that we often don't recognize how much it harms black Americans, especially because the rhetoric of it is that it's meant to help especially poor people throughout the country who couldn't afford alternatives is public schooling. Yes, absolutely. If I can go way anecdotal here, I grew up and I went to a magnet school and it was intentionally racially integrated, these advanced programs and all that. When I was in second grade, we moved just outside of the city district we didn't realize. And I had to switch schools and I went to this school that was a majority black. And the students had already came up to me like, you're the smartest kid in the school. I don't necessarily know that I was, but I was probably the best educated. And they're just like, and you're black. And I was like, yeah. And it didn't really mean anything to me at the time, but I look back on this, I transferred in fourth grade. But by that point, these kids had already taken a position that the white kids were the smart kids. And if this is something that they were being taught at that young age, I mean, I don't think they understood it at the time either. But they felt it. Yeah, they felt it. And of course, I was in the advanced classes all through school. And even though when I got to my majority black high school, the advanced class was mostly white. And that's a problem. But in a broader sense, you have these schools, again, because we talk about how segregated neighborhoods still are. Schools, neighborhood schools are vastly segregated. And I don't think there's a more dramatic explanation of this than right here in D.C. D.C. has the, I think the 51st out of 50 states and the district ranked public school system. And they spend the most money. And they spend the most money, much on security and other things, and administration. And in the outlying areas, in suburban Virginia and Maryland, you have, I think, three or four of the top public school districts in the country. You know, obviously it's not a geographic issue. You know, and it's going to have a, you know, it has to have a racial component on it because these schools on the outside, mostly white. Schools in D.C., almost 100% black. And it's, if you don't, if you trap these kids in these schools, as the public school systems do, you know, there's no way out. And we mean quite literally trap in the sense that, I mean, with the public school, it's where you live is what school you go to. And so if that school is bad, your only option is to up and move. And if you're poor, you don't have the options to move out to Fairfax County or some very wealthy county that has great schools. You just, you can't afford to do it. So you're stuck in the school system. The law doesn't allow you recourse. Yeah, there are horror stories. There's this woman, I think she was in Ohio that was prosecuted for lying where she lived to get her kid into a better school district. I mean, it's absurd. The- It's more, it's absurd and it's something that, you know, I don't use this rhetoric. It's a human rights violation in some basic sense. The people on the left like to use that rhetoric more. You're literally trapping people into school systems that if their kids go to them, they're worse off than if they don't go to school at all because they might end up in a gang. And then when they try to get out of it, you're putting them in jail. I mean, it's just unbelievable. It's a human rights violation on a big level. And what irritated me more than anything was when Obama came into office, one of his first priorities. Now keep in mind he had said that he was going to do not what it was good for, like the party, but it was going to be good for the people. And one of the first things his administration did was to limit the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, which is a local program in which you could get tax, was it tax credit or is it voucher? Voucher, I think. Yeah, that you could pull your kid out of the DC public school and take it to a charter school or a private school, whatever, wherever you wanted. The funny thing about that was it was effective. It wasn't, you know, these kids weren't like off, the kids who left weren't like off the charts better, but they were doing as well or better and for less money. And this was taking absolutely no money from the DC public schools. They moved to kill it probably on behalf of the teachers unions. And one of the excuses they used was, well, it's not available to enough children. Well, if you look at the history of the legislation that authorized the DC Opportunity Scholarship, the teachers union caved and said, well, yeah, but limit it to this amount of people. So here the DC teachers union says, you know, only this amount of kids can go into it. And then years later when they're stripping it, it's like, well, it's not available to enough people. So we have to. That's unfair, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely just infuriating. And there were protests, and I think they had it on life support for a while. I haven't checked and see where it is at this point. Well, then let's shift our focus a bit because given, I mean, the horror stories we've just described and these awful policies piled on top of awful policies, it would seem that libertarianism as both a political movement and an ideology would have a lot to offer to blacks, yet we don't see a whole lot of black libertarians or black self-identified libertarians. But what, I mean, let's start by saying what are some of the policies that libertarians advocate that would address the problems that we've been talking about? Well, yeah, well, certainly obviously ending the drug war is the biggest one. I think it goes a little broader than that because you do have to start thinking about how the police treat the people they come into contact with as a general rule. So I think just broader criminal justice reform would help. But again, and we were just touching on its school choice, allowing kids to get out of these terrible schools that are stunting their ability to become viable participants in a global market economy. They have to have a better opportunity to move up and libertarians have been leading the way on school choice for a very long time. Economic freedoms? I think libertarians have a lot to offer in this regard on business regulation. There are so many just sort of old protectionist, ridiculous rules that prevent people from starting businesses or even joining businesses. For example, there are rules in which moving companies in certain states aren't, have to sign off on any new entrant into the business. Well, why would they do that? So if someone's to start a moving company and say this, they have to go to this cartel and say, can we join your cartel? Customers would be deeply harmed if there were too many moving companies. Indeed. And there's also restrictions like for haircutting. Madam C.J. Walker was a famous black entrepreneur back in the early 20th century when she sold hair and skin products because black people a lot of times have different hair and skin needs than other people. But, and so hairstylists, barbershops, and other cosmetic stores are very popular in black communities. However, there are these regulations that prevent just anyone from going into business. There are some regulations about, because you have to be licensed to do some of these things, and some of these licenses are unavailable to you if you have a past criminal conviction. Or they're just super expensive too. Well, absolutely. Yeah, so they're cost prohibitive and if you're just, you know, just starting off, you know, just the amount of red tape and the amount of money that people face trying to go into business for themselves, which again, is the American dream, and I think in many respects. It's like starting off for yourself, being your own boss. Libertarians want to strike all this stuff down and I think that's something we can offer to, particularly the black entrepreneurs. Then what explains this relative lack of libertarianism among blacks? Well, I think part of it is that we have some very unfortunate past associations. I think a lot of people who kind of held on to the lost cause and holding on to the revisionist, southern way of the Civil War have kind of fell into our camp and they also tend to be anti-federal government and good for them, but they, when they talk about welfare and they talk about crime, it's often, it was coded language. You know, basically you look at the Willie Horton ad during President H.W. Bush's run. It was race-baiting. That was the ad that accused Dukakis of letting this guy out of jail who later killed some people, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was basically an attack on the pardon power, which is another story altogether, but the idea of the welfare queens and all this, and this is always associated with black people, even though more people on welfare are actually white, but it's like this sort of racial overtones that have fed white resentment politics for so long that is identified with libertarians fairly and unfairly, I think. I think that's like a real big part of it. And again, like your general association with the right Reagan, again, led the war on drugs. He, I mean, he didn't start it, Nixon did, but the way he ramped it up and the way that it affected black communities during that time, you know, anything kind of vaguely assigned with the right is not going to be most popular with black people. So I think- Although it used to be the case that all blacks were Republicans until about FDR, and it was the party of Lincoln. And now Republicans are supposed to be racist or they're often called racist, so any association we have with them is probably not helping us. Yeah, I think libertarians basically have a branding problem right now. And I think there's also sort of a misunderstanding in some of the policies that we pursue in the courts, but- So how should we talk about this stuff more in a different way, or what are we missing in communication-wise? I think part of it is to sort of make it clear that when we talk about we want to reform the welfare state, when we want to, you know, in this criminal justice issue that we understand that there is a racial component and we actually say, hey, this is wrong. And distance ourselves from those of the past who have kind of been in the same boat that we are. I think that would be a first step in a program in getting more people on board. Probably is not the best strategy too to endlessly talk about any of the Fed or macroeconomic policy or focus on corporate tax rates. That's the thing libertarians have more to offer about a theory of freedom. Absolutely. That's not just about tax rates and corporations and- Which are important issues. Of course, absolutely. But there's often the perception that we talk about those to the exclusion of other issues. Yeah, absolutely. I think in libertarian rhetoric, a lot of times we have fun with, you know, we have these mental exercises like how far do we believe this, like the famous quirk of libertarian summer seminars is like, well, what do you think about black tar heroin and vending machines? But one of the problems with this is one of these rhetorical flourishes is taxation equals slavery. And it sort of delegitimizes what American slavery looked like, what damage it did, what legacies it has left behind that we still feel today. And, you know, that they want to increase the capital gains tax. No, it's not the same thing. So I think, again, it goes back to a branding issue and just sort of understanding that freedom is more than free markets. Free markets are absolutely essential to freedom, but it is more than that. That there are actors and there are problems within our society that still, unfortunately, have this racial component and that those should be reckoned with and those must be dealt with. But there's this reticence of some libertarian Stephen address race because I think it's playing identity politics. And I don't agree with that. I think that when you have a community that knows it's being treated differently because of its race, because of resentment, because of just where the neighborhood is, that recognizing that and saying this is wrong and this needs change is important. But the idea that, oh, when we talk about issues that actually affect black people that's engaging in identity politics, it's weird to me. It's like saying, well, if you're talking to farmers and you wanna talk about the farm bill, well, let's pretend they're not farmers. No, they have issues because they are farmers. For people who want to read more, follow up with you on these issues, is there somewhere they can find you online? Absolutely. I have an irregularly updated blog at blankslate at blogspot.com and you can follow me on Twitter at blankslate. Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod, that's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.