Economists of the mid-nineteenth century opposed slavery. The greatest, David Ricardo, was a Jew and knew something about racism and oppression. The advocates of slavery opposed the economists. Thomas Carlyle, a socialist, dubbed economics the “dismal science” because the freedom that economists demanded would create a “dismal” world in which white people were equal with the “inferior” races, such as the people of Africa.
Leftist regressives, who called themselves Progressives, invented the truly dismal science of eugenics in order to suppress the population of minorities in the UK and US and force them to reduce their birthrates. They introduced the minimum wage in the US to prevent minorities such as Jews, Africans, Chinese, Mexicans and Native Americans from getting jobs. Regressives assumed that if those minorities couldn’t get jobs then they wouldn’t marry and have children. For details check out Princeton scholar Thomas C. Leonard's book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era.
