Moral Opposition to Cash Reparations
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Within a Hot Air blog post about a couple of cash reparations proposals in California comes the following good news, in the form of excerpts from a report on polling by the Los Angeles Times:
The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll, co-sponsored by The Times, found that 59% of voters oppose cash payments compared with 28% who support the idea. The lack of support for cash reparations was resounding, with more than 4 in 10 voters "strongly" opposed.I grant that neither moral objection is exactly individualistic, but I would bet that that would be because of bad polling questions -- with the top two answers simply being as close as there was to a "right" answer for many participants.
...
In the Berkeley poll, when voters who oppose reparations were asked why, the two main reasons cited most often were that "it's unfair to ask today's taxpayers to pay for wrongs committed in the past," picked by 60% of voters, and "it's not fair to single out one group for reparations when other racial and religious groups have been wronged in the past," chosen by 53%.
Only 19% said their reason was that the proposal would cost the state too much, suggesting that money alone is not the main objection. [bold added]
Curious about what Ayn Rand might have said about the subject, I found quite the rebuttal within her 1974 essay, "Moral Inflation," which includes the following:
There is no such thing as a collective guilt. A country may be held responsible for the actions of its government and it may be guilty of an evil (such as starting a war) -- but then it is a public, not a private, matter and the entire country has to bear the burden of paying reparations for it. The notion of random individuals paying for the sins of an entire country, is an unspeakable modern atrocity.It is easy to see how Rand's argument applies, despite (1) the different forms of the reparations -- violating the right to contract via quotas vs. violating property rights via wealth transfers; and (2) the current fashion of pleading "systemic" racism since individual racists are rare and (at least until recently) closeted.This country has no guilt to atone for in regard to its black citizens. Certainly, slavery was an enormous evil. But a country that fought a civil war to abolish slavery, has atoned for it on such a scale that to talk about racial quotas in addition, is grotesque However, it is not for injustices committed by the government that the modern racists are demanding reparations, but for racial prejudice -- i.e., for the personal views of private citizens. How can an individual be held responsible for the views of others, whom he has no power to control, who may be his intellectual enemies, whose views may be the opposite of his own? What can make him responsible for them? The answer we hear is: The fact that his skin is of the same color as theirs. If this is not an obliteration of morality, of intellectual integrity, of individual rights, of the freedom of man's mind (and, incidentally, of the First Amendment), you take it from here; I can't -- it turns my stomach.
Image by Thure de Thulstrup , via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The first paragraph probably would not come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with Ayn Rand, whom even many opponents would acknowledge as an individualist.
But the second paragraph deserves wide circulation, starting with its acknowledgment of the Civil War as reparation enough, in the only meaning of the term that it can be proper to discuss.
-- CAV
6 comments:
Hello Gus,
Ending slavery was a moral obligation for a grave and destructive injustice sanctioned by the government and therefore all those it represented, and if it took a civil war to end slavery, then that is because the institution of slavery was defended by the slave states and tolerated by the founders in their choice to compromise with the slave states in order to form a union. (They might have formed a union of only free states. They chose otherwise, and that choice had consequences that we're still having to address.)
Ending slavery, however, did nothing to address the harm that had been done by the institution. It stopped further such harm, but that doesn't account for the continual racism, including legally instituted racism, of Jim Crow laws and toleration for the terrorism of the KKK, etc.
When someone who had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned, perhaps for decades, is released from prison, the verdict overturned, should that be then end of it, or does justice require some form of reparations for the wrongful and destructed conviction and imprisonment?
"There is no such thing as a collective guilt. A country may be held responsible for the actions of its government and it may be guilty of an evil (such as starting a war) -- but then it is a public, not a private, matter and the entire country has to bear the burden of paying reparations for it." (Ayn Rand, "Moral Inflation")
How would that be done or how should that have been done in the past were it held to be necessary?
Rand provides the answer to that that you seek within the same reference I cited, at least for the cut-and dried case of a wrongfully convicted person: That person receives (I believe) or should receive reparations from the government for the same reason Rand describes for war reparations.
Regarding Jim Crow and similar bad laws, I don't have a great answer. Perhaps there ideally would have been reparations instituted shortly after repeal on a state-by-state basis, say in the form of tax breaks. Perhaps the quotas and government payments amounted to a very imperfect form of reparations, although to the degree they penalized the innocent, they compounded the original injustice.
I think it is safe to say that, after a certain point, the issue becomes moot simply through the passage of time and the mortality of the perpetrators. As to what that point is, I plead that I am not a philosopher of law.
Thank you, Gus, for your reply. I just finished reading (or rereading, as I believe I read the essay some time ago) "Moral Inflation." What an amazing thinker and communicator Miss Rand was. I wish she were still alive, grateful that she once was.
I take it that her view was that "a country that fought a civil war to abolish slavery, has atoned for it on such a scale that to talk about racial quotas in addition, is grotesque" meant that compensation to the former slaves was unwarranted. The country had atoned for the guilt of having tolerated slavery in its founding and the South had certainly paid for embracing slavery and defending the institution. The slaves were free.
If only the racism against blacks had ended with the Civil War.
(Thomas Sowell makes the case, as I understand him, in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, some of which one can listen to him read on YouTube, that racism in America, especially in the South, was the result of slavery, not its cause, the result of having to defend such an immoral institution. (There was also racism against Jews as well, but also other groups of new immigrants.) There wasn't, he said, such racism in South America even though there was comparable slavery of blacks at the same time. I guess they did not pretend to defend the institution morally. Don't remember if he identified why there was that difference; his point was that racism was the result of slavery, not its cause, the result of having to defend the morally indefensible.)
But the racism continued, especially in the South, and for that we continue to be troubled.
If only...
John,
Thanks for mentioning Sowell: Some time after I replied, it crossed my mind that his thoughts on the matter would be worth knowing, and I'd look at Walter Williams, too. (IIRC, I think each has directly addressed the issue of reparations, but I am rushed and traveling today, so can't take even a cursory glance right now to check.)
Gus
By the way, George Reisman's essay "Capitalism: The Cure for Racism" is available at Amazon (Kindle Edition), along with two other much shorter essays, for 99 cents. (His essay was first published in 1972, then in The Intellectual Activist in 1982.)
The three essays are:
01) Capitalism - The Cure for Racism
02) The White “Privilege” Scam
03) The Moral Necessity of Discrimination and Hate Speech
From his main essay:
"It was not capitalism and the profit motive that held blacks down, but a vicious desire on the part of governments to suppress blacks—a desire that was implemented in contradiction to capitalism and against the profit motive. To suppress blacks, it was necessary for the government to violate rights guaranteed by capitalism and to force businessmen to act in ways opposite to the way the profit motive would have led them to act.
"This consciously anti-black policy of government was not confined exclusively to the South. To some extent it existed even in the North. The possibility of its existence was everywhere that government officials possessed arbitrary power in any form that they might use to threaten or reward businessmen. But in the North, anti-black legislation disappeared in the decades following the Civil War, and the anti-black policies of governments enjoyed far less popular support than in the South and could not be proclaimed openly and defiantly. Thus, had the degree of capitalism existing in the North around the turn of the century been maintained, Northern blacks would have been assimilated.
"Unfortunately, such capitalism as existed at the turn of the century was not maintained. Starting in the decades prior to World War I, the whole country began to move away from capitalism at an accelerated rate. The federal government and, to a lesser extent, the state and local governments in both the North and the South adopted an ever-increasing array of economic controls and regulations. By the mid-1930's, after the implementation of the policies of President Hoover and then of the New Deal of President Roosevelt, the economic system of the North had become far removed from that of capitalism. Instead, the economic system of the North and of the whole country had become a mixed economy.
"Thus, by the time the great migration of blacks to the North took place—during World War II and the generation following—a very different kind of economy awaited them than had awaited the European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under the mixed economy into which they moved, blacks were deprived, and have continued to be deprived, of many of the benefits they would have received from the unhampered operation of the profit motive. And they have been made to bear other burdens and suffer other ill effects which result from the general policy of attempting to impose sacrifices on some men for the benefit of others. . . .
"Among the aspects of the mixed economy most relevant to the present discussion and which I will consider in turn are: anti-profit legislation and business timidity; pro-union legislation; minimum wage legislation; public-welfare laws; child-labor legislation; and compulsory, tax-supported education. These measures may be grouped together as suppressing the black in his capacity as a producer or income earner. In addition, however, another set of measures suppresses the black in his capacity as a consumer and in his general life. Thus, under the separate heading of "The Mixed Economy and the Living Conditions of Blacks," I will go on to consider the effects on blacks of: zoning laws; rent control; public housing; urban renewal; municipalized health and sanitation services; and franchise and licensing laws. And, finally, as part of this same discussion, I will consider the problem of crime in the black neighborhoods."
John,
On blogging break due to surgery (which went well) and moving-related obligations, hence my delay.
Thanks for mentioning the above material and supplying the highly relevant quotes.
Gus
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