Speranza suggested I make this a thread. I think this guy makes some very valid points.
The case against Reparations:
In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has created a minor sensation with his impassioned article “The Case for Reparations.” Coates pulls no punches. Notwithstanding his earlier doubts on the topic, his current position is crystal clear: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” From the point of view of a libertarian who has written against black reparations in the past, I shall assess the strengths and weaknesses of his position before turning to his proposed system of reparations. The Sins of the Past Coates writes with an urgency that carries his reader. He is at his best when he describes the various outrages of the American past in ways that are immediately accessible to all readers, regardless of race, sex, age, class, or national origin. Ironically, much of his narrative assumes a libertarian premise, even though Coates’s politics are anything but. The central libertarian principle is that every individual has rights against the rest of the world, to whom he or she owes correlative duties. Most vividly, the fundamental obligations are these: refrain from the use or threat of force; refrain from the use of false words to achieve private advantage; and keep your promises to others, just as you expect them to keep their promises to you. [snip] Considering the evidence Coates presents, a simple question arises: What should be done in response to the many wrongs of the distant and not so distant past? It is here that Coates falters. He is right that slave owners before the Civil War and the champions of Jim Crow afterwards exploited the black persons who lived under these regimes. Coates observes: “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all the productive capacity of the United States put together.” The tempting conclusion is that African Americans today should recoup the wealth that has, Coates argues, worked its way down to the current generation of Americans. Sadly, however, Coates fails to note that those resources were largely consumed by the miscreants who extracted them from the backs of slaves. At most a small sliver of wealth was passed down by inheritance for a generation or two. But none of it was shared gratuitously with the rest of the nation. Both slavery and Jim Crow hurt the rest of the population by preventing them from doing business with black workers who held productive jobs. As a general matter, virtually all the wealth that exists in the United States today has been created by the ingenuity of a dizzying array of inventors, entrepreneurs, immigrants, and countless others. No fund of wealth survives the demise of slavery and Jim Crow. Coates also suffers from acute tunnel vision. He ignores the contributions of people of all races who fought fiercely against the evils of slavery and Jim Crow. The civil rights movement of the middle of the last century could not have prevailed if white citizens had not supported it. Indeed, many people of all races gave civil rights their passionate all, much like the abolitionists of the century before. Nor does he pay much attention to the extensive affirmative action programs, both public and private, that have gained traction in the post–Civil Rights period. [snip] Coates is most evasive when discussing a proposed system of reparations. He notes quite properly that “broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” These are indeed fair questions, and yet at no point does he attempt to answer them. He endorses John Conyers proposal to form a Congressional committee to seek out “appropriate remedies” for the lingering effects of slavery and segregation, but offers few clues about its mission. Nor are there easy analogies at hand. One possibility is to try to design some system based on the model of reparations for the internment program of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. But there, the payments were made to specific persons who were direct victims of wrong by the government. No program that seeks to remedy the wrongs of the past 350 years could hope to duplicate that level of precision. Nor is the analysis of black reparations informed, as Coates suggests, by comparison to the decision of the German government to pay reparations to Israel in 1952 for the unspeakable sins of the Holocaust. Those payments of course could do nothing for the millions of individuals who lost their lives, but they did help the newly-founded Israel to gain strength in the first decade of its life. But the differences between these two cases overwhelm the similarities. Death by lynching in the South deserves emphatic condemnation. But let’s keep the numbers in perspective. We know that “nearly 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, mostly from 1882 to 1920.” The Holocaust took nearly 1,700 times as many lives in a four-year period. For that wrong, the payment to a new state was a sensible if incomplete remedy. But to whom should the payments be made here?
He goes on, but you get the drift. Anyone who was owed “reparations” for slavery is dead, as are the people who owed them the reparations. It is foolish at best to expect to right all of the wrongs done in the past, or to say what would have happened if instead another path had been followed. Surely, it would have been better if slavery had been outlawed at the inception of this country, but do most African Americans really agree with that? With out the demand for slaves, how many of their ancestors would have wound up in the United States? With no slavery, there is no Jim Crow, but there also would not be the large black population of today, and their overall demographics would be far different. To say that whites owe them for their slavery implies that they, as descendants of slaves, are essentially in the same position as the slaves themselves. That simply doesn’t pass the laugh test. Not in a country with Barack Obama as the head of State, and wealth celebrities who are African American in the prominent positions that they are in. The past is the past, and nothing can unsay it. But there were benefits, too, if not for the slaves themselves, but for their descendants.