Reparations - July 17, 2024 

If you aren't out anything; You aren't owed anything.

Claiming victimhood for what happened to other people is disgraceful. Ascribing guilt to people who had nothing to do with the offense is atrocious.

The Silliness that is the request for reparations. (pt 5 of 18) Demanding reparations for long past damages to ancestors (slavery) is stupid, moronic, short-sighted, and unwise. An essay by Dr. Thomas Sowell "REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY?" (pt 1 of 2) The first thing to understand about the issue of reparations for slavery is that no money is going to be paid. The very people who are demanding reparations know that it is not going to happen. Why then are they demanding something that they know they are not going to get? Because the demagogues themselves will benefit, even if nobody else does. Stirring up historic grievances pays off in publicity and votes. Some are saying that Congress should at least issue an official apology for slavery. But slavery is not something you can apologize for, any more than you can apologize for murder. You apologize for accidentally stepping on someone’s toes or for playing your TV too loud at night. But, if you have ever enslaved anybody, an apology is not going to cut it. And if you never enslaved anybody, then what are you apologizing for? The very idea of apologizing for what somebody else did is meaningless, however fashionable it has become. A scholar once said that the great economist David Ricardo “was above the unctuous phrases that cost so little and yield such ample returns.” Apparently many others are not. The only thing that would give the idea of reparations for slavery even the appearance of rationality is an assumption of collective guilt, passed down from generation to generation. But, if we start operating on the principle that people alive today are responsible for what their ancestors did in centuries past, we will be adopting a principle that can tear any society apart, especially a multi-ethnic society like the United States. Even if we were willing to go down that dangerous road, the facts of history do not square with the demand for reparations. Millions of immigrants arrived in this country from Europe, Asia and Latin America after slavery was over. Are their descendants guilty too and expected to pay out hard cash to redeem themselves? Even during the era of slavery, most white people owned no slaves. Are their descendants supposed to pay for the descendants of those who did?

The Silliness that is the request for reparations. (pt 6 of 18) Demanding reparations for long past damages to ancestors (slavery) is stupid, moronic, short-sighted, and unwise. An essay by Dr. Thomas Sowell "REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY?" (pt 2 of 2) What about the effect of all this on today’s black population? Is anyone made better off by being supplied with resentments and distractions from the task of developing the capabilities that pay off in a booming economy and a high-tech world? Whites may experience a passing annoyance over the reparations issue, but blacks-especially young blacks-can sustain more lasting damage from misallocating their time, attention and efforts. Does anyone seriously suggest that blacks in America today would be better off if they were in Africa? If not, then what is the compensation for? Sometimes it is claimed that slavery made a great contribution to the development of the American economy, from which other Americans benefitted, so that reparations would be like back pay. Although slaveowners benefitted from slavery, it is by no means obvious that there were net benefits to the economy as a whole, especially when you subtract the staggering costs of the Civil War. Should the immoral gains of dead people be repaid by living people who are no better off than if slavery had never existed? The poorest region of the United States has long been the region in which slavery was concentrated. The same is true of Brazil-and was true of 18th century Europe. The world-wide track record of slavery as an economic system is bad. Slaveowners benefitted, but that is not saying that the economy as a whole benefitted. The last desperate argument for reparations is that blacks have lower incomes and occupations than whites today because of the legacy of slavery. Do the people who say this seriously believe that black and white incomes and occupations would be the same if Africans had immigrated voluntarily to this country? Scholars who have spent years studying racial and ethnic groups in countries around the world have yet to come up with a single country where all the different groups have the same incomes and occupations. Why would people from Africa be the lone exception on this planet? Groups everywhere differ too much in too many ways to have the same outcomes. Slavery itself was not unique to Africans. The very word “slave” derives from the name of a European people-the Slavs, who were enslaved for centuries before the first African was brought to the Western Hemisphere. The tragic fact is that slavery existed all over the world, for thousands of years. Unfortunately, irresponsible demagogues have also existed for thousands of years.

The Silliness that is the request for reparations. (pt 7 of 18) Demanding reparations for long past damages to ancestors (slavery) is stupid, moronic, short-sighted, and unwise. Walter Williams on Slave Reparations. Calls for slavery reparations have returned with the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic magazine (May 21, 2014). In making his argument, Coates goes through the horrors of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. First off, let me say that I agree with reparations advocates that slavery was a horrible, despicable violation of basic human rights. The gross discrimination that followed emancipation made a mockery of the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution. I also agree slave owners and slave traders should make reparations to those whom they enslaved. The problem, of course, is slaves, slave owners and slave traders are all dead. Thus, punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is out of the hands of the living. Punishing perpetrators and compensating victims is not what reparations advocates want. They want government to compensate today's blacks for the bondage suffered by our ancestors. But there's a problem. Government has no resources of its very own. The only way for government to give one American a dollar is to first - through intimidation, threats and coercion - confiscate that dollar from some other American. Therefore, a moral question arises. What moral principle justifies punishing a white of today to compensate a black of today for what a white of yesterday did to a black of yesterday? There's another moral or fairness issue. A large percentage, if not most, of today's Americans - be they of European, Asian, African or Latin ancestry - don't even go back three or four generations as American citizens. Their ancestors arrived on our shores long after slavery. What standard of justice justifies their being taxed to compensate blacks for slavery? For example, in 1956, thousands of Hungarians fled the brutality of the USSR to settle in the U.S. What do Hungarians owe blacks for slavery? There's another thorny issue: During slavery, some free blacks purchased other blacks as a means to free family members. But other blacks owned slaves for the same reason whites owned slaves - to work farms or plantations. Are descendants of these slaveholding blacks eligible for and deserving of reparations? When African slavery began, there was no way Europeans could have enslaved millions of Africans. They had no immunity from diseases that flourished in tropical Africa. Capturing Africans to sell into slavery was done by Arabs and black Africans. Would reparations advocates demand that citizens of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya and several Muslim states tax themselves to make reparation payments to progeny of people whom their ancestors helped to enslave? Reparations advocates make the foolish unchallenged argument the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That's nonsense that cannot be supported by fact. Slavery doesn't have a very good record of producing wealth. Slavery was all over the South, and it was outlawed in most of the North. Buying into the reparations argument about the riches of slavery, one would conclude the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth of the matter is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our nation were places where slavery flourished - Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia - while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts. One of the most ignored facts about slavery's tragic history - and it's virtually a secret today - is that slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years. It did not become a moral issue until the 18th century. Plus, the moral crusade against slavery started in the West, most notably England. I think the call for slavery reparations is simply another hustle. Advocates are not demanding government send checks to individual black people. They want taxpayer money to be put into some kind of reparations fund from which black leaders decide who receives how much and for what purpose.