This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 7th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

The 1619 project has earned both praise and criticism

for its discussions of the institution of slavery.

Now as a TV production, Cato's Paul Meenie takes a close look at the project's

episode dealing most explicitly with American-style capitalism. We spoke last month. The

1619 project has been celebrated, it has been vilified, it has been scrutinized by various people.

I've spoken to Phil Magnus about his criticisms,

which are substantial, but not overwhelming.

He has very sort of pointed things to say.

Now the project, which has spawned a book and now a series on Hulu and most specifically this episode that you wanted to talk about sort of

zeros in on some of the criticisms that the 1619 project makes and the

connections that the 1619 project makes broadly between slavery, the products of slavery, and capitalism itself.

Yeah, so just to start off, the 1619 project has been extremely controversial, but I'd like to quickly make a caveat that not all of the 1619 project is extremely controversial.

A large chunk of it is very, very uncontroversial facts about history in America and what happened.

This episode on capitalism, which is derived from the original essay by Matt Desmond it's very very loose and it's much

looser than the original essay the TV show has a lot more to deal with and has to

put it in a much different format so it's much more

scatter brain a little bit all over it's not as cohesive as the original essays but I wanted to talk about it

because I think there's a lot of misconceptions and anti-capitalist bias in this episode that it's really useful to illustrate

why people go so wrong when they talk about capitalism and how we should think about it a little differently

and maybe also how libertarians talk about capitalism to convince people a little bit better.

...