Jump to content
Head Coach Openings 2024 ×
  • Current Donation Goals

    • Raised $2,716 of $3,600 target

The Problem with "Reparations"


Muda69

Recommended Posts

14 minutes ago, Wabash82 said:

If the federal government had seized your father's house that you were legally entitled to inherit, and many years later paid you the value of the house that you would have inherited, but for the government unlawfully taking it from your father, would you consider that payment "free stuff"? 

In an earlier post you mentioned the federal government denying people basic human rights, the right to liberty and self determination, etc. So we are in fact retroactively making today's laws apply to yesteryear. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, etc., regardless of how wrong they were, were in fact the law of the land at the time. Again, as I posted earlier how am I today, in 2019, along with every other tax payer to be held responsible for legal actions that our ancestors may or may not have committed 50-100-150 years ago? You specifically mention in your post the government "unlawfully" taking your father's house. Unlawful by what litmus test? The law at the time of the seizure or the law today?

What about women who couldn't vote? What about people who were denied alcohol during prohibition? What about all the drafted military who didn't make it home? What about the Native Americans? What about the gays who were denied marriage until four years ago?

Earlier in this thread I posted this below, no one has addressed any of these points:

1 How do you determine who gets reparations?

2 Who is on the hook for the bill? 

3 What is the price to right this wrong? How is it determined?

4 How do reparations move this country forward? Does it end racism? Does it put enough money in the economy that entire country becomes prosperous?

5 I don't understand how a US citizen of 2019 can be fined for the legal actions of their forefathers 150 years ago.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

35 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

In an earlier post you mentioned the federal government denying people basic human rights, the right to liberty and self determination, etc. So we are in fact retroactively making today's laws apply to yesteryear.

The Constitution has been law since the federal government began. It's a timeless document and applies to all, past and present.

  • Like 1
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

30 minutes ago, gonzoron said:

The Constitution has been law since the federal government began. It's a timeless document and applies to all, past and present.

Valid point, yet it is abridged constantly even today, mostly for the "common good". So at some point in the future do we have more added to the list of reparations?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, Impartial_Observer said:

Valid point, yet it is abridged constantly even today, mostly for the "common good". So at some point in the future do we have more added to the list of reparations?

Hope not. I'm against reparations.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Wabash82 said:

If the federal government had seized your father's house that you were legally entitled to inherit, and many years later paid you the value of the house that you would have inherited, but for the government unlawfully taking it from your father, would you consider that payment "free stuff"? 

What IO said.

 

  • Disdain 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Impartial_Observer said:

In an earlier post you mentioned the federal government denying people basic human rights, the right to liberty and self determination, etc. So we are in fact retroactively making today's laws apply to yesteryear. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, etc., regardless of how wrong they were, were in fact the law of the land at the time. Again, as I posted earlier how am I today, in 2019, along with every other tax payer to be held responsible for legal actions that our ancestors may or may not have committed 50-100-150 years ago? You specifically mention in your post the government "unlawfully" taking your father's house. Unlawful by what litmus test? The law at the time of the seizure or the law today?

What about women who couldn't vote? What about people who were denied alcohol during prohibition? What about all the drafted military who didn't make it home? What about the Native Americans? What about the gays who were denied marriage until four years ago?

Earlier in this thread I posted this below, no one has addressed any of these points:

1 How do you determine who gets reparations?

2 Who is on the hook for the bill? 

3 What is the price to right this wrong? How is it determined?

4 How do reparations move this country forward? Does it end racism? Does it put enough money in the economy that entire country becomes prosperous?

5 I don't understand how a US citizen of 2019 can be fined for the legal actions of their forefathers 150 years ago.

Lots to address in an internet forum.

Slavery was not lawful in the sense I am talking about AT ANY TIME.

 King George III was the "lawful" ruler of the American colonists in 1776 under English law, but he was not the lawful ruler of them under natural law, the law that creates the "inalienable rights" to which Thomas Jefferson referred in the Declaration of Independence. The mere fact that many human beings for thousands of years thought it was okay to deprive fellow humans of their liberty and property based on their skin color, and promulgated human laws to allow that, did not render those things lawful under natural law (or God's law, or however you wish to characterize it).

The fact that duly-elected representatives of the German people in the 1930s passed laws allowing handicapped children to be euthanized by the State didn't somehow deprive those children of their (human) right to life and make the State's killing of them "lawful" in any meaningful sense. 

Perhaps you believe that your right to life, right to liberty, right to self-defense, right to own property, right to pursue your own happiness all exist only because a human government has by law "created" them for you -- and therefore, by the jot of a pen, can also lawfully take them away from you.  But I doubt very many other Americans believe that is the true source of those rights. Those rights have existed under law that has existed from the begining of time. 

So in regard to deprivation of human rights we are talking about here, no, this is not imposing today's laws on prior generations. It is acknowledging that we now understand that prior generations of Americans, (whether in ignorance or even misguided good intent) used the power of government to deprive certain of their fellow men of the natural law rights that our nation's founders had readily acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence.  

As for the taxpayer thing -- you and other current taxpayers fund all sorts of federal government obligations that were incurred by our nation's government long  before you were born, by virtue the actions and decisions of prior generations. This is not about "punishing" you or holding you accountable for your personal ancestor's deeds; it is about the U.S. government taking responsibility for addressing injuries that the United States government inflicted in the past.  Again, I think  this focus on the accountability of particular individual's ancestors, instead of the accountability of the nation, is odd.

The other situations you mention -- women and voting; drinkers and prohibition; military draftees; gays and marriage -- do not in my mind necessarily involve deprivation of basic human rights, and I think the "damages" argument could be tougher to make.  I'd still certainly look at a couple of them. But I don't see how the possibility of other comparable situations existing affects the validity of this one? 

The four issues you list are what the hearings are designed to explore. It seems to me that logical answers would include: 

1) folks who are the ancestors of slaves. 

2) the U.S. government.

3) Needs analysis -- the actual damages are probably too high to realistically consider paying -- the present value of the labor that was taken without compensation for over 300 years? The overall wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans? Maybe the present value of the 40 acres and a mule promised in 1865? (That's facetious.) 

4) It could do many things, but the main thing it would do, like a posthumous pardon of a wrongfully convicted man, is do justice. 

5) all ready addressed.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Wabash82 said:

1) folks who are the ancestors of slaves. 

2) the U.S. government.

3) Needs analysis -- the actual damages are probably too high to realistically consider paying -- the present value of the labor that was taken without compensation for over 300 years? The overall wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans? Maybe the present value of the 40 acres and a mule promised in 1865? (That's facetious.) 

4) It could do many things, but the main thing it would do, like a posthumous pardon of a wrongfully convicted man, is do justice. 

5) all ready addressed.

To address your responses should reparations every become passed into law:

1)  With "free money" on the line those folks will be coming out of the woodwork.  Expect the federal courts to be tied up even more than they already are and the federal bureaucracy to grow even larger in response to whatever proof the federal government requires to prove an individual is an ancestor of slaves.  And BTW the term "ancestor of slaves" is somewhat ambiguous.  Expect court challenges on that one as well.

2)  And exactly where will the U.S. government get this money?

3) Again, expect legal challenges to whatever figure the federal government comes up with, dragging the actual disbursement of payments out years, maybe decades.

4) Nice, feel good words.  And as Mr. Coleman Hughes stated in his address to Congress:  "Reparations by definition are only given to victims, so the moment you give me reparations, you’ve made me into a victim without my consent. Not just that, you’ve made 1/3 of black Americans who poll against reparations into victims without their consent, and black Americans have fought too long for the right to define themselves to be spoken for in such a condescending manner."    

5)  Yes, much like the ultimately ill-fated "individual mandate" of Obamacare.  I have to pay just because I exist in the United States of America.   That isn't freedom,  it is yet another form of bondage.

 

  • Disdain 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/05/case-against-reparations-kevin-d-williamson/

Quote

Ta-Nehisi Coates has done a public service with his essay “The Case for Reparations,” and the service he has done is to show that there is not much of a case for reparations. Mr. Coates’s beautifully written monograph is intelligent and sometimes moving, and the moral and political case he makes is not to be discounted lightly, but it is not a persuasive case for converting the liberal Anglo-American tradition of justice into a system of racial apportionment. Mr. Coates and those who share his views would no doubt observe that the Anglo-American practice, despite its liberal rhetoric, was a system of racial apportionment, and a brutal one at that, for centuries, with real-world consequences that continue to be large facts of American life to this day — and they would be correct. But the remedy Mr. Coates proposes would not satisfy the criterion of justice, nor is it likely that it would reduce or even substantially eliminate the very large socioeconomic differences that distinguish the black experience of American life from the white experience of it.

...

Mr. Coates engages in what certainly feels like a little misdirection. Responding to the very fair criticism that public policy designed to help the disadvantaged should distinguish between, say, the Obama daughters and those without their advantages, Mr. Coates is having none of it: “In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much.” The truth or untruth of that claim can only be ascertained by asking the question that Mr. Coates is committed to ignoring: “Compared with whom?” Did Barack or Michelle Obama inherit disadvantages that forced them to perform twice as well, and bear twice as much, as a white woman born into horrific poverty in Appalachia? A white orphan? A white immigrant escaping the Third Reich? A racial disadvantage is only one of many kinds of disadvantages that can be inherited — why should it be the one around which we organize ourselves? Mr. Coates himself comes from a fairly modest background, but he, a man without an undergraduate degree, is a visiting scholar at MIT, one of the most exclusive academic institutions in the world, a position he enjoys as part of a program that excludes whites. (“The Program is open to individuals of any minority group, with an emphasis on the appointment of African Americans.”) There are, of course, many programs of that sort, and it is possible that poor whites resent them more than they should — the view from Owsley County, Ky, or from Lubbock, Texas, might make it difficult to see the so-called white supremacy that is so unmistakably obvious to Mr. Coates. But dealing with that reality inescapably entails treating people as individuals, and treating people as individuals makes reparations morally and intellectually impossible — even if we accept in toto Mr. Coates’s argument that the brutal imposition of white-supremacist policies is the entire basis for the relative social positions of blacks and whites in the United States in 2014. Which is to say: Even if we accept the facts of aggregate advantage and disadvantage with their roots in historical injustice, the aggregate cannot be converted into the collective inasmuch as neither advantage nor disadvantage is universal on either side nor linked to a straightforward chain of causality. Some blacks are born into college-educated, well-off households, and some whites are born to heroin-addicted single mothers, and even the totality of racial crimes throughout American history does not mean that one of these things matters and one does not.

Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress. Mr. Coates also, I think, miscalculates what the real-world effects of converting our liberal conception of justice into a system of racial appropriation might mean. There are still, after all, an awful lot of white people, and though many of them might be inclined to make amends under some sort of racial truce following the process Mr. Coates imagines, many of them might simply be inclined to prevail. The fact is that the situation of African Americans in the United States has improved precisely to the extent that whites have begun to forgo tribalism and to genuinely commit themselves to the principles of liberalism, the long march toward a more perfect Union. The alternative — a system of exclusive interests in which black and white operate effectively in opposition — is not only morally repugnant, but likely to undermine the genuine political and economic interests of African Americans.

It may very well be the case that African Americans will never, no matter what policies are enacted, catch up economically with whites. Even assuming that invidious racism were an entirely negligible factor, it is likely that economic development will tend to proceed along broad racial channels if, for example, people of various ethnicities tend to largely marry within their ethnic group, live in neighborhoods largely populated by co-ethnics, and engage in other social-sorting behavior that is racial at its root but not really what we mean by the word “racism.” If that is the case — and it seems that it is — then initial conditions will be very important for a very long period of time.

And that would be true even if there had been no slavery and no discrimination. Imagine, for example, that rather than having been brought to the colonies as slaves, the first Africans to arrive in the New World had come as penniless immigrants in 1900. If their incomes grew in the subsequent century at the same rate as those of white natives, then a century later they’d still be as far behind as they were when they arrived. Income gaps have been closed and closed quickly by some immigrant groups — notably European Jews, Vietnamese immigrants, and Indian immigrants — because their incomes across the first few generations grew much, much more quickly than the native rate. And though the hostility that often met these immigrants is not comparable to the experience of slavery and African Americans’ subsequent repression, it is worth appreciating that Jewish and Asian immigrants have not always been welcomed with universal warmth. The black experience is unique within the context of American history, but it is hardly unique within the context of the experience of other racial minorities in other societies throughout history.

Mr. Coates is largely correct about the past and is to a degree correct about the present. About the future, he is catastrophically wrong. The political interests of African Americans, like those of other Americans, are best served by equality under the law. The economic interests of African Americans, like those of other Americans, are best served by a dynamic and growing economy, preferably one in which the labor force is liberated from the dysfunctional, antique Prussian model of education that contributes so much to black poverty. The people to whom reparations were owed are long dead; our duty is to the living, and to generations yet to come, and their interests are best served by liberty and prosperity, not by moral theater.

 

  • Disdain 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Wrenching Reparations Question: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/slavery-reparations-debate-democratic-candidates/

Quote

...

But would reparations for African Americans be justified? It must be clear that systematic government action has deprived African Americans of wealth and property that would otherwise be theirs. This much seems incontestable. From slavery to Jim Crow and beyond, the unfair treatment of African Americans could not have occurred without the active participation of the U.S. government.

Of course, it is impossible to go back and compensate the actual victims of that history of abuse, though there are people alive today who lived through Jim Crow and who can remember grandparents who were slaves. But the legacy of that history lives on. Although the methodology behind such calculations is spotty, economists estimate that slavery and the years of discrimination that followed deprived the African-American community of more than $10 trillion. Nor should we ignore the cultural impact of years of racially motivated mistreatment.

In addition, it must be admitted that much white wealth was unjustly derived from the unjust treatment of African Americans. This includes insurance companies that sold insurance on the value of slaves, banks that made loans against the value of slaves, newspapers that ran advertisements for slave auctions, railroads that made use of slave labor, and even universities that funded their early endowments on the slave trade. While it is impossible to put a dollar value on the amount of white wealth that can be traced back to slavery, it is hard to deny that whites as a group are better off because slavery existed.

And, similarly, discrimination against African Americans, from the end of slavery until today, has increased white opportunities, wages, and business profits. None of this is to say that whites haven’t worked for what they have, but clearly the playing field hasn’t been level.

Yet even if one could make a legitimate moral case for reparations, implementation would pose extraordinary problems to which none of the Democratic candidates appear to have given any thought. In fact, the gaps are obvious enough to suggest that the sudden support for reparations actually amounts to little more than pandering.

For example, the taxes necessary to pay the billions and even trillions of dollars being casually discussed would totally wreck the economy. (Recall that reparations taxes would be on top of the taxes already announced by Democratic contenders and the additional taxes needed to finance their grandiose spending plans.) In what way would African Americans gain from higher unemployment, slower wage growth, and less entrepreneurship? The goal should be to move the poor and people of color into the mainstream of a growing economy, not to make economic growth harder to come by.

Nor have the candidates wrestled with the thorny issue of culpability and victimhood. Who should pay and who should be eligible for benefits? How should we even define “African American,” given the widespread history of rape during slavery and intermarriage since? Modern research suggests that at least a third of African Americans have at least one white ancestor. Do we want to return to the “one drop” rule?

Consider, for instance, Vincene Verdun of the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, who wrote one of the earliest law-review articles on reparations. As she herself notes, as the descendant of both slaves and slaveholders, she is both a victim and a wrongdoer. For that matter, records of slavery are incomplete and inaccurate, meaning that it will often be difficult to trace ancestry accurately. Reparations would be an invitation to perpetual litigation.

There is also the question of whether and how to treat descendants of free blacks or black immigrants who arrived post-slavery. Should they be recompensed for injustice under Jim Crow even if they didn’t endure the worst abuses of slavery? On the flip side, what about whites who have no slave-owning forebears, who have ancestors who fought for the Union side in the Civil War, or who immigrated post–Civil War? How should their degree of historical culpability be apportioned? Answering such questions is far more likely to tear Americans apart rather than contribute to the racial healing necessary to move forward.

In the end, most discussion of reparations seems to boil down to little more than traditional tax-and-spend policies, prettified with new rationales. But government social-welfare programs have a dismal track record when it comes to bridging the racial divide and empowering African Americans. Doubling down on failed programs is not really making reparations.

Clearly, this country needs to do more to make up for its history of racism. There are policies that would go a long way toward overcoming America’s legacy of racism and would benefit African Americans in substantial ways. Those policies range from criminal-justice reform to school choice to an end to racially motivated zoning. But unless they are willing to answer some hard questions, the Democratic candidates should not be allowed to pretend that reparations are one of those policies.

Mr. Tanner brings up some of the difficult, if not impossible, implementation problems that a true reparations program would bring.    Is this country truly wealthy enough to correctly implement such a program, but from a monetary and social standpoint?  I don't believe that it is.

 

  • Disdain 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Indian Claims Commission had the federal government pay out over a billion dollars in the 50s 60s and 70s to Native American groups.

It is general considered that the federal government did not feel the Natives were competent to get the money directly and held it in trusts.

North Carolina and Japan has paid reparations for government ran forced sterilization programs, California is considering the same.

Florida has paid reparations to the victims of Rosewood who where brutalized by the Klan and other racist terrorists back in the 20s.  The state acknowledged they did nothing to curb the violence.

Interred Japanese Americans were compensated for racist government policies during WW2.  

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Reparations for Everyone, Apparently: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/elizabeth-warrens-tax-plan-reparations-for-everyone/

Quote

Redressing old grievances has become something of a pastime for Congress as it searches for problems to solve (or create, as the need presents itself). Last Thursday, Elizabeth Warren re-introduced the Refund Equality Act, a bill that would retroactively grant tax refunds to same-sex couples who were married in their states before the Obergefell decision in 2015. The federal government had denied those couples the deductions that it granted to married couples because, according to the federal government, they weren’t married.

...

We’re talking about reparations now!

What was once a linguistic and religious discussion — an argument over what “marriage” meant and didn’t mean, and whether it was a civil right to be extended or a necessarily exclusive institution with an unchanging definition — has now been repackaged as a proxy war in which the side of the angels (and goodness, and truth, and light, and Elizabeth Warren) does battle against “hate.”

....

*sigh*. So the slippery slope begins.  Where does do reparations end?  Say my sister was called "fat" by a couple of middle school gym teachers back in the 1970's and now claims government agents caused her irreparable emotional harm that seriously hinders her ability to hold a job.  She should demand, and receive, reparations from the government.

 

 

32 minutes ago, BARRYOSAMA said:

The Indian Claims Commission had the federal government pay out over a billion dollars in the 50s 60s and 70s to Native American groups.

It is general considered that the federal government did not feel the Natives were competent to get the money directly and held it in trusts.

North Carolina and Japan has paid reparations for government ran forced sterilization programs, California is considering the same.

Florida has paid reparations to the victims of Rosewood who where brutalized by the Klan and other racist terrorists back in the 20s.  The state acknowledged they did nothing to curb the violence.

Interred Japanese Americans were compensated for racist government policies during WW2.  

So why don't the prior slave holding states pass and fund their own slavery reparations programs, similar to what other states have done for these groups you describe?

 

 

Edited by Muda69
  • Disdain 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/25/2019 at 5:41 PM, Wabash82 said:

Lots to address in an internet forum.

Slavery was not lawful in the sense I am talking about AT ANY TIME.

 King George III was the "lawful" ruler of the American colonists in 1776 under English law, but he was not the lawful ruler of them under natural law, the law that creates the "inalienable rights" to which Thomas Jefferson referred in the Declaration of Independence. The mere fact that many human beings for thousands of years thought it was okay to deprive fellow humans of their liberty and property based on their skin color, and promulgated human laws to allow that, did not render those things lawful under natural law (or God's law, or however you wish to characterize it).

The fact that duly-elected representatives of the German people in the 1930s passed laws allowing handicapped children to be euthanized by the State didn't somehow deprive those children of their (human) right to life and make the State's killing of them "lawful" in any meaningful sense. 

Perhaps you believe that your right to life, right to liberty, right to self-defense, right to own property, right to pursue your own happiness all exist only because a human government has by law "created" them for you -- and therefore, by the jot of a pen, can also lawfully take them away from you.  But I doubt very many other Americans believe that is the true source of those rights. Those rights have existed under law that has existed from the begining of time. 

So in regard to deprivation of human rights we are talking about here, no, this is not imposing today's laws on prior generations. It is acknowledging that we now understand that prior generations of Americans, (whether in ignorance or even misguided good intent) used the power of government to deprive certain of their fellow men of the natural law rights that our nation's founders had readily acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence.  

As for the taxpayer thing -- you and other current taxpayers fund all sorts of federal government obligations that were incurred by our nation's government long  before you were born, by virtue the actions and decisions of prior generations. This is not about "punishing" you or holding you accountable for your personal ancestor's deeds; it is about the U.S. government taking responsibility for addressing injuries that the United States government inflicted in the past.  Again, I think  this focus on the accountability of particular individual's ancestors, instead of the accountability of the nation, is odd.

The other situations you mention -- women and voting; drinkers and prohibition; military draftees; gays and marriage -- do not in my mind necessarily involve deprivation of basic human rights, and I think the "damages" argument could be tougher to make.  I'd still certainly look at a couple of them. But I don't see how the possibility of other comparable situations existing affects the validity of this one? 

The four issues you list are what the hearings are designed to explore. It seems to me that logical answers would include: 

1) folks who are the ancestors of slaves. 

2) the U.S. government.

3) Needs analysis -- the actual damages are probably too high to realistically consider paying -- the present value of the labor that was taken without compensation for over 300 years? The overall wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans? Maybe the present value of the 40 acres and a mule promised in 1865? (That's facetious.) 

4) It could do many things, but the main thing it would do, like a posthumous pardon of a wrongfully convicted man, is do justice. 

5) all ready addressed.

W82, I see why you're a lawyer. Once again, our "inalienable rights" are abridged EVERY DAY. You among others have been in favor of that via "jot of the pen" for the greater good. 

For the purpose of my original post in this thread, lets focus on slavery, which you seem to be focused on.

1. From what I can see there were around 4 million slaves in 1860. I'm guess birth records are somewhat difficult to find for slaves and their offspring. This will most certainly be a boon for your profession.

2. The US government produces nothing, it's sole source of income is the US taxpayer.....well that and the fact they can just print money.

3. The devil is always in the details isn't it.

4. So in other words it changes NOTHING, but we can all feel better because we did "something". 

5. So if my dad got popped for murder, receives a 60 year sentence, dies 10 years in, I should go serve the rest of his sentence for him. 

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

34 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

5. So if my dad got popped for murder, receives a 60 year sentence, dies 10 years in, I should go serve the rest of his sentence for him. 

 

Not quite.  If he died in prison after 10 years but then was found to actually be innocent shouldn't all his descendants receive reparations for the wages he was deprived of earning during those 10 years?

 

  • Disdain 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...