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.