This is the Cato Daily podcast for Monday, February 24, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Racial categories serve few, if any, positive purposes when it comes to government.

And yet, even if you accept racial categorization as a beneficial tool for the state,

it's still deeply flawed.

Cato's John Early explains.

John, I don't know how you feel about this, but I have always been highly suspicious of

attempts to make use of race when it comes to,

having race be a governmentally cataloged category.

What are your thoughts on that?

I think I would share that view generally.

And what's interesting is that in the last two years,

any reservations that you and I might have had on that regard would have been raised to maybe a

power of 30 or 30 times worse. And we'll get into some of why that is so and how that happened

and everything here. So what does race as a

category do? What does it accomplish that's, you know, in your view, good or bad? Well, so far as I can

tell, it doesn't do anything useful. And it can be done to be very bad. Look what the Nazis did.

I mean, I hate to pick on them, but they're the most recent case in history, but it goes back thousands of years.

I would say Rwanda is a more recent case in history.

Yeah, but there are a lot of them.

And in fact, I'm going to take off a few of them here in our discussion.

But as far as I can tell from history,

...