Thursday, June 20, 2019

Reparations

Reparations comes into the news now and again, and there is a run on it lately.  I recall Grim making a sincere effort about a year ago to acknowledge what reasonableness he could and seek some discussion on the matter. My recollection is his own readers were harsh about that, but I think the effort should be applauded. I have an attorney friend who works for the NH Supreme Court, and part of his job is to seek out cases that might have some interesting principle to be explored, even if they ultimately failed. I continue to believe that if you can get two SCOTUS justices to vote in your favor there is at least something defensible about your theory, even if it will never be strong enough to carry the day.  It is half-truths that give us more trouble than flat lies, after all.  Marxism has some power of persuasion because it is essentially an heretical form of Christianity.

People think reparations must be fair because black people have less than white ones, even after the eliminations of great swaths of official prejudice. Because some explanations for this are not allowed, the idea that past mistreatment must be part of the reason remains standing, even when evidence goes against it.

I would like to add one bit to the discussion.  Not the most important one, perhaps, but worth noting. The idea that people got rich off slavery is flawed. Slaves provided an enormous amount of labor, rewarded only by deeply inadequate shelter and food.  If we were to compute the value of that in terms of wages to be paid, it would be a very large amount. However, if we compute it differently, in terms of "at the end of the year, how much more value did slaveowners have," the number would be far less.  The system wasn't that efficient and slaveowners weren't all that smart. In the more genteel areas, such as Virginia and Maryland, slaveowners did get very inexpensive servants and this increased their standard of living. (Supporting aged slaves and children of slaves curt into this somewhat, but it was still cheap.) In Mississippi and other cotton-growing states after the invention of the cotton gin, however, nobody made much of anything.  Whatever money they made went into buying more slaves and more land, but the owners still had terrible shelter, terrible food, no education for themselves or children, little furniture, fine clothing.  Some people made money off them and had nice things, but this was concentrated in a very few areas. 

We can see this more clearly if we think in terms of medieval European warfare, where dukes and princes hired armies at great expense in a seemingly endless series of battles and campaigns to conquer territory from each other. They frequently bankrupted each other, the soldiers spent their pay on drink and women, and often, a lot of money was spent but no one was better off and a lot of people were dead.  Just because work was done and money spent does not mean that anyone benefited. Look also to businesses that people start.  They put in real work, requiring real skill, but ten years later, nobody has made anything.  Work is often good for success, but there isn't a linear relationship with profit. Look around you friends, families, and near ancestors and you can see that it is possible to work very hard and still not prosper. That was even more true in history, when people had fewer choices and were less free, than it is today.

I don't want to overpaint this, that no one made anything, and America had the same standard of living it would have had otherwise.  People made money.  People did better. In the older coastal areas where slaves were a cultural replacement for servants, the First Families of Virginia lived better at the time, but made their fortunes to pass on to later generations.  One of the interesting things is that under the free market, even slaves had a higher standard of living, gradually, decade after decade.  It's a pretty good advertisement for "capitalism," that even when people don't care about you and sometimes even actively oppress you, your standard of living still goes up. The North did well off the South, though they might have done about as well either way.  The gradual rise was real - but separating out what was advancement because of freedom and what was advancement because of slavery is not only difficult, but impossible to sort out.

Yet in the end, even outside of the terrible discussions of who should be billed and who should be compensated, there is the question of how much difference it all made. 

5 comments:

Grim said...

My recollection is [Grim's] own readers were harsh about that, but I think the effort should be applauded.

That's my own fault for cultivating such a difficult bunch. I could have run them off, but instead I made them welcome. For years I had this excerpt from a Chesterton poem at the top of the page:

"How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,
Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.
Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,
When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.
The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose, --
You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes."

I asked for it. It's a small band, but a worthy one.

It's not as if they're wrong, either. The best I could do still involved some very difficult steps, especially trying to sort out the genealogy of, well, every person in the United States. Now that would be worth doing on its own, even simply as a treasury of history; but it's not easy, if it could be done at all. And even then, it would be disruptive in many respects.

The post you were talking about is here, in case anyone wants to read it.

https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2019/02/reparations.html

I also talked about it five years ago:

https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2014/05/on-reparations.html

DirtyJobsGuy said...

I few years ago I was in Ghana on business. One of our local partners commented on the large tour groups of black Americans coming to see the old slave fort in Accra. He went on a tirade about how lucky their ancestors were to have been sold as slaves. I didn’t say anything, but I knew what he was trying to say. For the actual slaves it was a horrible condition and injustice, but to look backwards and focus on that injustice was foolish for blacks in America. It seemed like every other Ghanian had a cousin or brother in Buffalo or NYC who had a small business or good job. Everyone knew the US visa system chapter and verse from our driver to the CEO of companies. Ghana is a pretty stable and prosperous place for Africa (it’s a zero AK-47 score on our informal security scale!). Locals know that to get to the USA would allow them to fully take advantage of their skills and opportunities.

To focus on reparations does great harm to today’s black Americans, blinding them to opportunities and actually increasing official benign racism.

Christopher B said...

Tangent to your comments, and inspired by a couple of excerpts from other NR writer's (Kevin Williamson was one) in yesterday's Morning Jolt by Jim Geraghty.

It's not about the money. Never was, never will be. There were 'forty acres and a mule' proposals back in the day when former slaves and their descendants would have been relatively easy to identify, and financial assistance would have done some real good for people directly affected by slavery. Didn't happen then, won't happen now. If it was about the money, proponents would have a number in mind and would be trying to identify someone to negotiate for payment. They would be pushing for the implementation of a plan, not a vaguely defined study. If the Democrats get to the point of proposing to actually send money to people based on their genetics we'll be lucky if the worst thing that happens is the Democrat party's implosion, and I think they know it.

Reparations talk runs inversely to LBJ's infamous prophesy as he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Now look at the current front runners for the 2020 Democrat Presidential nomination. White. Old. Female (within realm of possibility). I'm sure the number crunchers have the figures to back up an eyeball estimation that one of the contributing factors to Hillary's losses in WI, PA, and MI was lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy among black voters. That lack of enthusiasm likely trickled down to other elections, and possibly other states, as well. I don't expect that Trump will gain a lot of votes from blacks but there are indications he's making more inroads than recent Republican candidates. There are reasons to believe, such minority unemployment rates and his support for the Second Chance and sentencing reform bills, that there may not be a burning desire among blacks to turn him out of the White House without a hot-button like reparations.

The persistence of sub-optimal outcomes for black Americans is a real and difficult problem to assess and address. Unfortunately, the root causes are deeply entangled with the history of race relations in this country. The idea that factors inside us but outside our control, be they genetic or cultural or some combination of both, have an impact on life outcomes is an uncomfortable proposition to many people. Reparations proponents want to get the identification of those internal factors taken off the table and the focus placed squarely on external factors. I think that in the end, as I started, it’s not about the money. It’s about making sure that racism is the only acceptable explanation for any negatively perceived difference between races.

Aggie said...

It seems to me that the main purpose of reparations talk is to move the idea of handing out free money into a safely defensible area, far away from more modern policy failures - in the sense that the problems of modern race relations and the plight of blacks is predominantly due to these more recent factors, not ancient ones like slavery.

Slavery as a cause of modern problems is near the very bottom of the list, when compared to institutional issues like systematic public educational corruption (graduating people who can't read or add), public assistance careerism, abortion availability, single parenting, teen parenting, thug culture, drug culture, and so forth. It's also at the bottom of the list of re-dressable or at least ameliorable conditions. How easy it is to point a finger at slavery as a root cause and stake a claim! No guilty party need be produced or persecuted, leaving all energies free to single-mindedly pursue the reward. It might just work, at least until a reasonable multinational historical perspective is applied.

Envy is at the root of Democrat's platforms, so reparations has a place at the table. Without the animating forces attributable to envy, their whole message falls flat on its face from lack of purpose.

Dan Kurt said...

The answer my friends is blowing in the wind: THE TYRANNY OF THE IQ CURVE.

Dan Kurt