In this history of dumb ideas, this idea that today, in the modern, free United States, anyone who has never owned a slave should be liable to pay financial compensation for people who have never been slaves has to be one of the dumbest.
And yet, we have members of Congress, as well as various local and state governments and activist groups, proposing just that, presumably in atonement for some weird kind of original sin for which nobody alive today has perpetrated or suffered from. There was even an act of Congress proposed to study the matter, which went (thankfully) nowhere.
Here's the biggest reason this is a bad idea: Namely, that price has already been paid, and to spare. Here are some of those amounts:
- The Battle of Gettysburg, 1863: 51,000 casualties.
- The Seven Days Battles, 1862: 36,500 casualties.
- The Battle of Chickamauga, 1863: 34,600 casualties.
- The Battle of Chancellorsville, 1863: 30,500 casualties.
- The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, 1864: 31,000 casualties.
- The Battle of Antietam, 1862: 23,000 casualties.
- The Battle of the Wilderness, 1862: 28,700 casualties.
- The Battle of Shiloh, 1862, 23, 7000 casualties.
Between these major battles and all of the minor scraps, scrapes, and skirmishes, not to mention disease, the total Civil War butcher's bill came in at somewhere between 620,000 and 625,000 deaths and 470,000 to 500,000 wounded, many suffering amputations. That doesn't include what likely billions in property damage, homes burned, crops ruined, and all of the costs of reconstruction.
One of those casualties, incidentally, was my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Baty, who served in a volunteer infantry regiment and died at age 46 from complications of wounds suffered in that war.
So, this bill has been paid, with interest. The argument should end there, but there are some other things to consider.
First: Who pays? Does a person have to have a single ancestor who was a slave? Two? Three? What about someone like Barack Obama, who never had a single American ancestor who was a black slave, and yet is clearly what we call "black" despite his white mother? Does he have to pay for the white half of his family tree? And there's the other part of this question of who pays, that being immigrants, both before and after the end of American slavery: One-fourth of my ancestry, my maternal grandmother's family, immigrated from Germany in 1850, settled in Wisconsin, and never owned a single slave. Is my portion of the bill then to be cut by a fourth?
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Second: Who qualifies? Back to Barack Obama again; half his ancestry is white, the other half came from Africa, his father, long after slavery ended. Should he get a penny? The obvious answer is "no," but there's the contingent who squeal that every black person is oppressed in some way, even someone like Obama, who was raised in large part by his wealthy white grandparents and had a youth marked by wealth and privilege. The simple fact is this: There has been so much intermarriage, so many "mixed-race" kids born, that the very notion of "black" is becoming pretty fuzzy. Do we go by some fuzzily identified DNA markers? Appearance? Or do we go back to the old Jim Crow "one drop" rule, where one drop of black blood - whatever that is - makes one black?
Third: Even if we do this, even if everyone who can be identified as black gets a payment, will the proponents of this dumb idea accept it as resolved? No, we can't. Clark's Law of Social Issues Absurdity applies: Every social movement, everything that attracts radical activists, sooner or later descends into intolerance and absurdity. This issue has already passed that mark, but expect it to delve into greater depths of absurdity even if these payments are somehow made - and bear in mind that some estimates of these payments exceed the country's GDP. No, once initial payments are tendered, with the wildly inflationary, economy-wrecking consequences that will inevitably follow, the recipients and their advocates will claim it wasn't enough, that oppression is still a thing, and that they need more.
Let's not even get into the very fact that every presumption this dumb idea is based on is actually, fundamentally racist in its own right: Punishing one group of people who did nothing wrong, solely because of the color of their skin, and rewarding another group of people who suffered no wrong, again, solely because of the color of their skin.
The cold fact is that the very idea of reparations is so stupid as to beggar description. I simply cannot conjure enough adjectives to describe the idiocy of this idea adequately, but allow one metaphor: The idea of reparations for a practice that ended over 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 Ivy League-educated attorney who happens to be black.
It’s lunacy. It’s the worst sort of political pandering. And, fortunately, it's a dumb idea that appears to have limited support, except amongst the worst of the peripatetic grievance-mongers.
