Reparations

An important principle in political and general social life is that one should never accept undeserved guilt or blame. Power seekers know that guilty and uncertain people are easier to manipulate and control and often try  to induce feelings of  guilt in those they wish to dominate.  Their attempts should be rejected, and usually emphatically. So it is with the recent nonsense coming from leftist politicians about collecting “reparations”  from other  Americans to give to black people for slavery and Jim  Crow.

There is no one alive today who had anything to do with promoting, supporting, or participating in slavery in America.  (There are a good number of people alive today on the American left who are complicit in supporting slavery in Cuba, the Soviet Empire, Mao’s China, and other communist hellholes, but that is a different story.)  Neither is there anyone alive who suffered from it.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 abolished Jim Crow laws in the states that still had them. The voting age in 1964 was twenty one. So no one born after 1943 could have helped elect  the politicians who kept those laws on the books.  We are simply not guilty in the matter and owe nothing to anyone for it, and should not be bashful about making  that clear.  (It also would not hurt to point out that in the Civil War to end slavery, it cost about one union soldier dead  for each ten slaves liberated. Including the dead rebels, most of whom did not own slaves,  raises the cost to about one for six.)

However there might be one possible exception where an other than manifestly absurd case could be made for reparations. There is one large, wealthy, and powerful organization  still active in this country that supported and protected slavery with rebellion in the South and subversion in the North  when others were trying to end it. It is the same organization that deprived black citizens of their civil rights as soon after the  Civil War as union occupation forces left the South and enacted and maintained segregation and Jim Crow laws in the former confederate states for almost  a hundred years.  That organization is the Democratic Party.   If there is to be a tab,  they would be the bunch to pay it. I would pony up for pay TV to watch a debate among the 712 Democratic presidential candidates on that question.