Except for one brief moment of frustration and madness, Ethics Alarms has been consistent in its derision of the concept of reparations for slavery. Illogical, legally unhinged, divisive, anti-democratic and most of all, impossible, this really bad idea, a favorite of get-rich-quick racial grievance hucksters and reality-resistant progressives, still hangs around like old unwashed socks, and no amount of argument or reasoning seems to be able to send them to the rag pile. Recently both California, where terrible leftist ideas go to thrive and ruin things, and New York, which really should be moved to the West Coast, have both at least pretended to endorse reparations for slavery. California’s ridiculous reparations task force has proposed giving $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California, on the theory that it will be a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers would be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget (that the state already can’t afford), and that doesn’t include the massive cost of administrating the hand-outs and dealing with all the law suits it is bound to generate.
Brilliant. But that’s reparations for you! Logic, common sense and reality have nothing to do with it.
Now comes two wokey professors from—you guessed it, Harvard, to issue a scholarly paper published in “The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences,” titled “Normalizing Reparations: U.S. Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans.” The thesis of this thing is essentially that reparations for slavery should be paid because “Everybody Does It,” offering variations of the #1 rationalization on the list that don’t properly apply to slavery at all. (What? The descendants of slaves are not like fishermen facing depleted fish stocks?) The paper is being called a “study”: it is not a study, but rather an activist advocacy piece. (I would have bet that both scholars are black; nope, just one is, although I would not be surprised to learn that Linda J. Bilmes signed on just to help Cornell William Brooks avoid the obvious accusation of bias and conflict of interest. And, naturally, at Harvard taking on such a mission, certifiably bats though it is, can only enhance her popularity on campus.)
The study is a comparing apples to oranges—maybe apples to Beluga whales is more accurate—classic. It cites various programs that the federal government has implemented in the past to compensate citizens who have “experienced physical harms or economic loss through no fault of their own” to as precedents for racial reparations:”Categories of those harmed who have been compensated include coal miners; farmers whose crops have failed; workers whose companies have gone bankrupt; victims of terrorism and natural disasters; people exposed to nuclear radiation; military veterans; individuals wrongfully convicted in the legal system; people denied earnings on tribal lands; fishermen facing depleted fish stocks; individuals harmed by pesticides, toxins, vaccines, or medical devices; workers and businesses affected by U.S. trade agreements; depositors in banks; and numerous other categories.”
How interesting. But none of these are remotely similar to a massive income transfer based entirely on race, or in response to a completely legal system that ended over 150 years ago. The two professors also ludicrously argue that the trillions of dollars such a massive program would require really shouldn’t be that much of a problem—for a nation already deep in the flashing red zone with its national debt. They write,
“A key finding of our research is that the federal government draws on designated fees, trust funds, excise taxes, subsidized insurance premiums, and customized financial arrangements to help pay for the wide system of reparatory compensation…The existence of these programs shows not only the creativity of the federal government in devising methods of compensation, but also the government’s ability to structure and administer programs, to define eligibility standards, and to provide oversight on the distribution of benefits,
Oh. The scholars cite the federal government’s 2023 actions to protect those affected by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as proof of the wisdom of their conclusion. They really do. No, I wouldn’t make up something like that: this is how these two roll! Right, compensating living depositors of a single bank is exactly like giving money to everyone with a slave in his or her family tree. I’m convinced!
There is no doubt—Is there?—that race hucksters chasing the reparations pot of gold will now cite this piece of junk as “science” to support their scam.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to read this abuse of academic credentials and scholarly journal prestige and explain what’s wrong with it, logically and ethically. You don’t need to be a professor to do it, or a scholar, or a Harvard grad, or, I suspect, even an adult. But have fun, take a hand, go crazy. This is what academia has become.
Ethics Alarms 
What was the “one brief moment of frustration and madness” you speak of? I don’t recall you EVER favoring reparations.
Aaah, I did. I momentarily went crazy and wrote that it would be worth one mass pay-off with a guarantee that this would re-set the clock and the US would not be hounded about “privilege ” and “systemic racism” ever again. I was briefly convinced that the only way to heal the divisions and the back-sliding of race-relations was to just pay the extortion money.
Let us never speak of it again.
“Let us never speak of it again.“
Like Stu Preissler (Steve Martin) said to Jack Black’s Brad Harris in the (IMO) highfreakin’larious The Big Year:
Mum’s The Word…
PWS
One must be harmed to gain standing. That will limit any reparations if any are to be had. Moreover, it will be necessary to deduct any transfers previously received because it must be assumed that their eligibility was predicated on the harm for which they are now getting compensated.
I still think it would be better to bypass the whole argument about who gets compensation and how much by (relatively) simply helping people who need help, regardless of whether or not the reason they need help was crimes and injustices perpetrated against their ancestors.
If we want to help people anyway, that obviates any need to run the impossible calculation of how rich a person would be if their ancestors over multiple generations had been treated without prejudice by the legal, educational, medical, and financial systems of the time… as well as social connections who were also treated without prejudice… and therefore they didn’t develop any mental or emotional health issues as a result of the unethical actions of prejudiced people.
paging Harry Selden. Psychohistory calculations are required…..once all the variables are identified. Pray the Mule doesn’t interfere.
I tried to read at least some of it…and I spent a little time on the “Figures & Data” tab as well.
I guess I go back to the same responses I’ve always had…and the authors of that piece provided a nice little diagram in Figure 1 that help me.
How do reparations move anyone from “Victim” to “Redressed”? They can’t, because all the victims are dead, and there aren’t any new victims around.
How do reparations move the “Guilty” to a place of “Accountability”? They can’t, because all the guilty are dead and there aren’t any new perpetrators around.
So what reparations really boils down to is a bunch of innocent people being declared guilty of a crime they didn’t commit and being forced – via taxation, which I have to believe harms “victims as well – to pay a bunch of money to people who aren’t the victim of any crime at all.
Isn’t that the sideways definition of “theft”? A person not guilty of a crime is forced to give money to another person that’s not a victim…?
The entire reparations thing – particularly involving slavery – is just immoral.
One idea I read somewhere is that the U.S. government pay cash reparations to the estates of those enslaved under the laws of the U.S. or the states, and then ordinary inheritance laws would be used to distribute the cash.
Under this idea, Bosnian or Vietnanese refugees adopted by descendants of these slaves would also be descendants, and may inherit some of these cash reparations.
Probate lawyers would be main beneficiaries of this idea.
I believe this idea is still taking money from those that didn’t commit a crime and giving it to those who aren’t victims.
The idea that I understand them making is that they are suffering the aftereffects of the slavery and the reparations are for the diminished monetary benefits and liberties they experience because of the US’s period of slavery. The problem with this is, how do you determine how much they were harmed?
Now, I’m not sure how you do that. The ‘reparations committees’ have been doing some interesting math and coming up with ’85 bazillion dollars’. They seem to be using the same math the feminists use when they claim that the work of housewives is worth $500,000/year on the open market. The most interesting argument I have heard is that you have to compare black Americans’ experience today to what it would be if the US…no… if Europeans had never gone to Africa to purchase black slaves. If Europeans had never gone to Africa to purchase black slaves, then Africa would have continued with their internal/Arab Muslim slave trade unhindered. Christian Europe would never have revolted against sinful slavery. Europe and the US would never have banned slavery internally, nor would they have gone on a crusade to eradicate slavery in their (now nonexistent) empire. The descendants of the black African slaves would remain black African slaves in Africa or they would never be, since the Muslim slave trade castrated all male slaves to keep them from reproducing.
So, the proper reparation is the difference between the experience of the black American in the US today and a black African slave in Africa or castrated in the Middle East. Do THAT math.
The first US slave was John Casor. He claimed he was an indentured servant and went to work for a white man. His master Anthony Johnson, denied that he was an indentured servant. A few sources have said that Johnson claimed that (since Johnson was an Angolan), Virginia needed to treat Casor like a hereditary slave, as they were in Angola (this is not in the court decision, however). Two white men testified on Casor’s behalf that he (Casor) had an indenture and had served it, so was free to leave Johnson and work as a free man for others. The court ruled that Casor was to be treated as a lifelong slave and returned to Johnson. Johnson would regret his action. When he died, Virginia gave his plantation to a white man, ruling that as a black Angolan, Johnson wasn’t a citizen of Virginia. Thus, it is possible that black slavery in America began due to a multicultural argument when an African man said Virginia had to acknowledge African cultural norms when dealing with Africans and couldn’t force European culture on them.
You aren’t allowed to say things like this or discuss the things above and that is why we can’t have an honest discussion about race and slavery in this country. If you are only allowed to repeat the ‘official narrative’ and can’t discuss things like those above (no matter how radical or absurd), you don’t have an honest discussion.