Many politicians and activists are now insisting that modern-day African Americans deserve reparations for the enslavement of black people in America prior to the Thirteenth Amendment. A prominent justification for reparations is the racial income gap, and activists think reparations will put blacks on equal footing with white Americans.

The historian Quinn Slobodian presents us in his article “Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans: Race, Migration, and the Limits of Ludwig von Mises’s Globalism,” Contemporary European History (2018), with a surprising interpretation of Ludwig von Mises. According to Slobodian, Mises was a racist who favored colonial wars of subjugation to open the world to trade. In this week’s article, I’d like to look at how Slobodian reaches this conclusion.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.