When you look at policy proposals from the left, you can always count on one thing: Their proposals always boil down to taking money away from people who have earned it and giving it to people who have not. You can rely on this as surely as you can rely on the sun coming up in the morning, as surely as clouds make rain, as surely as Eric Swallwell falls for Chinese honey traps.
One of the more egregious and, frankly, stupid examples of this is the constant drumbeat of "reparations." Now, the word "reparations" can mean many things, but among American leftists, it generally means taking money away from people who have never owned slaves and giving to to people who have never been slaves. Even in states where slavery was never legal, this drumbeat goes on, with the reparations meant to address "systemic discrimination" or some other such horse squeeze.
And, again, as sure as April showers bring May flowers, Congressional Democrats are trying this again.
A coalition of Democratic lawmakers and advocates on Thursday reintroduced a resolution to offer reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans and people of African descent.
Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) led the reintroduction of the Reparations Now resolution, which was first introduced in 2023 by former Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.).
“We’re here to say that there’s no more waiting, no more watering down, no more putting justice on layaway,” said Lee, the descendant of enslaved Africans. “Black folks are owed more than thoughts and prayers. We’re owed repair, we’re owed restitution and we’re owed justice.”
Here's the thing: None of these people is owed anything. None of these people were ever held as slaves. No person alive in the United States today has ever owned a slave. Legal discrimination, systemic discrimination under the law, has been a non-issue in this country for decades. These people are looking, once more, to take money from people who earned it and give it to people who have not. That's all there is to it.
So, let's look at this egregiously dumb idea. Let’s set aside for a moment the 655,000 men who died and the million who were wounded fighting the United States’ bloodiest, fratricidal war that ended the institution of slavery. Let’s likewise set aside that this war ended in 1865.
Let’s also set aside for a moment that there is nobody alive today in the United States who (legally) held another person in slavery, nor is there anyone alive today in the United States who was (legally) held in slavery.
Let’s talk for just a moment or two about how this supposed reparations scheme might be put into effect.
This is, of course, another manifestation of the usual “I want the government to take money away from group A and give it to group B.” Well, presumably, white people are group A, and black people are group B. Let’s examine that for a moment.
Taking myself as an example: Most of my family has been in North America since well before the Revolution, scattered from Nova Scotia to the Dakotas. But one branch, my paternal grandmother’s family, came to the United States from Germany in 1851 and settled in New York, later in Ohio. None of them ever owned a slave. So, is my portion of this so-called debt to be reduced by a fourth?
See Also: Washington's Governor Ferguson Commits Reparations Outrage
WATCH: California GOP Legislator Uses Logic to Destroy Democrat During Debate on Reparations Bill
Take, as another example, someone who (let’s say it quietly) shares the exact ancestry of, oh, let’s say a certain former president, whose father was a Kenyan student and whose mother was a white American woman. Is he due any payment under this scheme? No one in his ancestry, anywhere, ever was affected by the pre-Civil War "Peculiar Institution." This person in question was mostly raised by his wealthy white American grandparents and attended the elite Hawaiian Punahou Academy before his Ivy League education.
But were we to assume he is somehow partially entitled through his ancestry, should his white half pay his black half? Is the mere idea of being black all that is required to qualify for a reparations payment? If so, how do we define "black?" Is there a certain percentage of "black" ancestry required, or are we reviving the Jim Crow-era "one drop" rule?
The cold fact is that the very idea of reparations is so stupid as to beggar description. It is just not possible to conjure enough adjectives to describe the idiocy of this idea adequately, but allow one metaphor; the idea of reparations for a practice that ended a century-and-a-half ago is to make the case that, for example, a white coal miner in Appalachia owes some monetary debt to an Ive League-educated attorney who happens to be black. And selling it as "reparations for systemic discrimination" won't fly, either; not when some of the loudest mouths shouting for this are members of Congress, and their very presence there argues against any claims of "systemic discrimination."
This is a stupid idea. It's political pandering of the worst sort. And the left will, no doubt, keep yelling about it.
Lord, what fools these mortals be.
