Freedom, Capitalism, and America's Missing Revolution
A conversation with history professor Andrew Hartman.
Since I spent last week’s episode detailing the thrilling ins and outs of making your own 2026 financial plan for wealth-maxxing, today I’m taking a hard left turn and interviewing Andrew Hartman, a history professor and the author of Karl Marx in America, a 500-page tome about which he says, and here I quote directly, “My father-in-law told me that he likes the book even though he still doesn’t like Marx.” We talked about:
- The limitations of theories from the founding Enlightenment thinkbois like Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, which mostly pre-dated industrial capitalism
- The "gospel of success" as an anesthetic for an uproarious working class who did not go gently from their farms into factories
- A surprising role for corporations, which have—ironically—done more to "socialize production" than any other modern entity
- The trap of thinking about class as an "identity," rather than a relationship
- How wealth inequality creates speculative markets and bubbles
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Transcripts, show notes, resources, and credits at: https://www.moneywithkatie.com/the_mwk_show/freedom-capitalism-missing-revolution.
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