Reparations—Again!
The idea of reparations has a hypnotic effect on blacks. Not only does it console them with the idea that black failure is someone else’s fault, it comes with the intoxicating fantasy that money will drop out of the sky. The latest version of this fantasy is Ta-Nehisi Coates’Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations.”
There are simple, devastating arguments against reparations for slavery. First, it was practiced by individuals–not the government–yet the government is supposed to tax us to pay for it. Of course, there is no legitimate moral or legal theory that requires today’s whites to pay for something a few whites last did 150 years ago.
Only one household in five in the Confederacy owned slaves. Even if it were possible to track down current descendants, there is no legal theory under which they should pay anything either. My grandfather may have murdered your grandfather, but you have no claim on me. You can go shout at my grandfather’s gravestone if you like, but I owe you nothing.
Some people claim it was slavery that made the United States rich, so reparations would just share the wealth. This is foolishness. Slaves were manpower–manpower directed by whites–and were hardly a miracle of productivity. Many abolitionists argued that slave labor was grossly inefficient and that blacks would be more productive if they were put to work at prevailing wages. Indeed, the South, where slavery was practiced longest and which had the largest black population, was always poorer than the North.
African blacks practiced slavery for centuries before Americans did, and it was Africans who sold slaves to whites. There is hardly a single known case of whites capturing and enslaving a black. If Ta-Nehisi Coates wants to blame someone for slavery, he can start with Africans. . . .
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