Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’m reconsidering my position on reparations for slavery. I’d be willing to have the United States government pay every person who was held as a slave in the United States. The proof could be DNA, family records, distinctive cheekbones or even oral family history. Once qualified, the applicant would be eligible to receive a reparations payment of $1 million. If the eligible person is deceased, the payment would be distributed to his/her heirs, per stirpes.
True, after a few generations, the payment amounts will be insultingly small but that’s because the relationship between the recipient and the harm is increasingly distant. My kids can expect a modest inheritance from me; my grandkids less so, my great-grandkids probably none at all, and the same for reparations.
By making the million-dollar payment, the United States would settle all accounts with the former slaves and the books would be balanced. Accepting the payment would include a waiver of entitlement to preferential treatment on account of race. Society would no longer entertain complaints about school discipline having a disparate impact, would no longer offer affirmative action in college admissions, would abandon goals and timetables for employment, and would outlaw set-aside quotas for minority owned businesses.
Any person who took the money and then tried to play the race card would be incarcerated for life without possibility of parole in prisons located in Siberia, operated under contract between our governments, since they have the infrastructure already built and trained personnel ready at hand.
Yes, it would cost a fortune. But if we could finally put the legacy of slavery behind us, it might be worth it.
Joe Doakes
There are times I wonder if paying the issue off with prejudice as Joe describes forty years ago might not have saved money.
It don’t work that way.
The activists are never, ever going to be satisfied because their misery and anger is not caused by a lack of reparations.
“distinctive cheekbones” wouldn’t that make the person an Injun?
Slavery costs the slave owners too much money. They have to feed, clothe and house their slaves and if they want productive work, they have to look after their medical needs too. These are fixed costs that cannot be reduced in downturns.
Plantation owners found that the abolition of slavery was so much cheaper and more cost effective. The slaves were now ‘free’ and so responsible to find their own homes and to dress and maintain them selves as plantation ‘workers’. However when the price of commodities fell, the slave owners, sorry — the “plantation owners” could simply reduce the wage to labor.
To continue the Emery stream of consciousness BS:
“but they fought the Civil War on a lark anyway”.
The E-Collective succinctly explains why slavery as a business model never took hold in the United States and utterly failed to flourish from 1619 to 1865, when it was pointlessly outlawed by Constitutional Amendment following a completely unnecessary War of Northern Aggression fought to end a practice that did not widely exist.
It’s important to note the political party which supported the economically disasterous policy of slavery was the Democrats, who are still pushing economically disasterous policies. The problem isn’t slavery: the problem is Democrats.
There were two reasons why people in the US opposed slavery before the Civil War. One was based on religion, the other on economics.
But the economic argument against slavery was probably not what you think that it was. The study of economics was not especially advanced in the 1840s and 1850s.
Bastiat did not publish his most notable book (The Law) until 1850.
If you read the literature of the time, what you find is people are opposed to slavery because where slavery was allowed, the small family farms withered. Small family farms had a difficult time competing with the plantation and slave system.
There were a few people who believed that it was a scientific fact that blacks were the biological and intellectual equal of whites, but no one cared what they thought.
When slavery was abolished, the system that replaced it was not the small family farm, and it was not industry. It was sharecropping.
Pro-slavery SiTD is the best SiTD.
Wow, JK. Just wow.
You are as nutty as Emery.
You need to seperate the economic issue from the moral issue. Assuming that the two are the same — that the morally correct thing to do is identical with the economically correct thing to do takes you to some very bad places. Economic questions are considerably easier to solve than moral questions, so the temptation is to solve for the economic solution and assume the moral question is thereby answered.
Next time, we’ll pick our own damn cotton.
It wasn’t the poor whites in the south who imported slaves to work for them or financed slave traders. Those were the rich white guys whose descendants vote Democrat these days.
So an article on reparations is “pro-slavery” to the kraphead.
You’re right MO, just wow.
We used to call such people sh*t for brains.
New name for you kraphead: SFB.