This debate will not go away. There is a reason for this. First, there is a lot of money on the line. Second, the welfare state ideology is widespread.
The case for reparations is the case for the welfare state.
The case for reparations to blacks in general from society in general rests on a concept of collective victimization and collective guilt. It says that Americans in general are guilty. In this case, the reparations argument claims that all Americans are collectively responsible today for what specific slave owners in the American South did to specific blacks prior to the summer of 1865.
I reject the argument. That is because I reject the idea of the welfare state.
The welfare state is messianic. Its defenders claim it can heal. They believe it can bring salvation -- a word linked to the root word for "salve" -- a healing ointment.
The state cannot heal. That is because it cannot bring positive sanctions without imposing negative sanctions. The case for reparations is a case for net positive state sanctions, based on social justice. This case is deeply flawed -- morally and judicially.
FROM THE VETO TO COERCION
First and foremost, the state is not a legitimate agency of positive sanctions. This is the most fundamental principle of civil government that is being widely violated today. The welfare state rests upon the philosophical and religious premise that God has created the state, or voters have created the state, as a means of extracting wealth from certain groups and transferring this wealth to other groups.
The state can never create wealth. This is the fundamental point. The state extracts wealth through taxation, and is therefore an agency of wealth consumption. It takes money to run the state. There is no profit-and-loss system to enable us to turn the state into a profit-making institution. The state demands monopoly of coercion. There is no open entry, unlike the free market. The state is not governed by a system of consumer authority.
The economic defense of democracy is that those who are being victimized by special-interest voters have a right to organize and veto programs of corporate wealth extraction. The voters are also in a position to veto anything else the state is going to do to them.
The problem comes when certain special-interest groups figure out that they can use their ability to mobilize other voters to extract wealth from victims who do not have enough votes. Here is the principle of welfare state transfers: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." Of course, it is not really majority vote. It is the ability to game the system, usually in a way invisible to most voters.
Whenever some people learn to vote for a living, the result is the welfare state. Whenever people learn that they can use the state, not merely as a way to veto state coercion against them, but to impose state coercion on others, and thereby benefit from this coercion, we see the birth of the welfare state.
Whenever the state is empowered to extract wealth from one group and transfer it to another group, based on the voting capacity of the two groups, we have created a means of massive theft.
The judicial goal of the state should be to transfer wealth from perpetrators of crimes to their victims. The state is an agency of wealth transfer, but not wealth transfer in general. It is specific wealth transfer: from perpetrators of crimes who have been convicted by a jury, to their victims. This is the biblical system of justice. This is also what Bastiat proclaimed. This is what the early libertarian movement, founded by Leonard E. Reed, also proclaimed in the early years. This is the doctrine of limited government. It should be called the doctrine of limited civil government. Civil government is limited, so that individual self-government, family government, and church government can flourish. It is never a question of government versus no government. It is always a question of which government.
In order to reduce the level of violence in a society, and to create greater predictability with respect to violence, the West has set up a jury system. When someone believes he is the victim of fraud or coercion, he challenges that person in a court of law. A jury of their peers is then to try the case. The jury decides innocence and guilt. The jury decides what should be done in terms of restitution in specific cases.
COLLECTIVE GUILT, COLLECTIVE VICTIMHOOD
The problem comes whenever voters accept a system of civil government that says that specific criminals owe something to society in general. This is redefined to mean that the criminals must suffer penalties imposed by the state, and the state will extract wealth from voters in general in order to be able to impose the penalties.
There is no restitution by criminals to their victims. The victims are in fact doubly coerced. First, they lose money or something of value when a thief steals from them. Second, they lose money when the state sets up a system of prisons that costs more per year per inmate than a Harvard education costs per student.
The political problem that we face today is the doctrine of collective guilt. There is also a doctrine of collective victimization. The criminal justice system today is based on the assumption that a criminal who has committed a crime against a specific victim does not owe the victim anything. He owes society in general: time in prison. This is called "paying your debt to society." But society in general was not victimized by the criminal. Nevertheless, society in general today is going to pay the taxes to create a massive housing system known as the prison system. Specific beneficiaries do very well economically, namely, employees of those agencies that run the prison system. These people get lifetime employment. The taxpayers pay for this lifetime employment.
The next step of the logic of collectivization is the assertion of collective guilt and collective victimhood. All kinds of groups play this political game. It is the foundation of welfare state politics. It is the violation of the principle of victim's rights. I have written a book on this. Download it here.
REPARATIONS
A small group of vociferous leaders in the black community have been trying to cash in on this political game for a generation. They have invented a theory of collective guilt for slavery and also collective victimization.
The victims of slavery are long dead. The perpetrators of slavery are long dead. If any person claims that he is a victim of a slave system which ended in 1865, let him go into a court, and let him sue the perpetrator. Let the two of them come before a jury, and let the jury decide whether the person claiming to be the victim has a legal case.
The point is this: specific victims must bring charges against specific perpetrators. There are not victims in general; there are not perpetrators in general.
So, my opposition to the idea of reparations is based on my rejection of the concept of the messianic state: a state that uses taxation to benefit certain groups at the expense of other groups. This concept is invoked in the name of social justice -- not individual justice. This authority is not based on specific acts of violence or theft by specific perpetrators against specific people.
This doctrine of social justice creates the welfare state mentality. Many groups then seek to identify themselves as being a collective group of victims. The goal of politics is to extract wealth from groups that don't have enough votes to defend themselves, and which are then identified as exploiters. Then, on the basis of a false accusation of collective exploitation, the groups with more votes extract wealth from the members of these rival collective groups. This is the heart, mind, and soul of the welfare state.
CONCLUSION
The statute of limitations for American slavery ran out no later than 1873. Judicially, this is obvious. But welfare state promoters do not care about judicial details. They invoke what they regard as the moral high ground. They appeal to something they call social justice. If you want to understand the nature of the debate over social justice, read my hypothetical chat between a defender of collective social justice and a skeptic.
The United States today is populated by (1) heirs of Americans who owned slaves in 1860; (2) heirs of people who lived above the Mason-Dixon line; (3) heirs of people who immigrated to the United States after 1865; (4) heirs of people who lived below the Mason-Dixon line in 1860, but who did not own slaves; and (5) heirs of slaves. The first group is small.
The promoters of reparations believe that people in groups 1-4 owe many billions of dollars to people in group five. The heart of this political accusation is the doctrine of collective guilt. But it is not just collective guilt. It is collective guilt that has been transferred down through the generations.
There is a very specific verse in the Bible that deals with the concept of guilt that is handed down from an earlier generation.
The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin (Deuteronomy 24:16).
Reparations? Don't look to the Bible for authorization. Look instead to the welfare state -- something also not authorized by the Bible.
In the spring of 1962, I was watching the irascible Tom Duggan on a local independent TV station, the lowest-rated station in the city, Channel 13. Duggan was a pioneer of a variation of the late-night talk show, which Steve Allen had invented on Los Angeles radio in the late 1940's. Duggan used to interview controversial people. Hollywood stars would not bother to show up. It was a low-budget show. The only thing he is remembered for today is having inadvertently launched the career of Regis Philbin, one of the station's low-paid staffers.
That night, Malcolm X showed up. Duggan used to invite various local liberal activists onto his show. Then he would verbally taunt them. Sometimes they would come back for another round a few months later. They wanted TV exposure. Duggan gave them a little. That was all they could get.
Malcolm went through his well-developed guilt-manipulation presentation. He was a master at making white liberals feel rotten about themselves, and then offering them no way to atone. "What should we do to help?" "Nothing." Nevertheless, inconsistently, he demanded reparations.
I saw him speak, live, in the UCLA student union shortly thereafter. He was impressive. If you were a liberal, he was devastating. I wasn't a liberal, but I appreciated great rhetoric. The man could talk!
After arguing with Malcolm for about 15 minutes, Duggan responded: "My great grandfather fought for the Union in order to free your ancestors. Malcolm, you are an ungrateful man." Malcolm had met his match. He was not going to score points with Duggan. Guilt manipulation did not work.
Those five words -- "You are an ungrateful man" -- immunized me early. I recommend them.
© 2022 GaryNorth.com, Inc., 2005-2021 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.