This article was originally published by Wanjiru Njoya at The Mises Institute.
As Kamala Harris declares herself open to paying reparations for slavery in a desperate bid to win more black voters, the debate about redressing historical injustices has been once again reignited. California has passed a raft of new proposals “as part of a reparations legislative package” with policies on education, housing, and criminal justice for the benefit of black people. New York has created a commission to study the harms caused by slavery with a view to paying reparations. In Oklahoma, a commission has been set up “to study how reparations can be made.”
Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the Church of England is making plans to fund reparations for slavery.
The Church of England should create a fund of 1 billion pounds ($1.27 billion) to address its historic links to slavery, an advisory panel said Monday. That’s 10 times the amount the church previously set aside.
An independent oversight group established by the church said a 100-million-pound fund announced last year was insufficient compared to the wealth of the church and “the moral sin and crime of African chattel enslavement.”
The arguments in support of paying reparations are based on the principle that slavery is wrong, and therefore someone ought to make restitution and right that historical wrong. But little attention is paid to the question of who should now pay to redress historical wrongs and why that person should be held liable for historical crimes. The applicable principle here is that of individual responsibility—no one is responsible for the crimes of another and, therefore, no innocent person should be forced to pay for historical wrongs. David Gordon, discussing the case of Germany paying reparations for Hitler’s crimes, cites with approval the Welsh philosopher H.D. Lewis who said:
If I were asked to put forward an ethical principle which I considered to be especially certain, it would be that no one can be responsible, in the properly ethical sense, for the conduct of another. Responsibility belongs essentially to the individual.
The government will pay
Proponents of reparations argue that no individual is being asked to pay, as liability falls on the state. The government will pay!
But where does the government get money to make payments? From taxpayers who are wholly innocent of the crimes for which the government is enthusiastically making restitution.
One response that might be given is that the involvement of legislators lends democratic legitimacy to the imposition of this burden on taxpayers. After all, individual taxpayers do not get to pick and choose the projects to which their taxes will be applied and it could be said that the case of reparations is no different from any other tax expenditure.
This argument fails on two grounds. First, as David Gordon frequently reminds us, taxation is theft. It is no answer to say that the majority voted in favor of theft. Second, and more pertinent to the specific case of reparations, even if a majority agrees through the democratic process to violate the rights of any individual by punishing him for crimes of which he is innocent, that does not make the punishment fair or just. It is simply another example of the danger which Hans Hoppe wrote about in Democracy: The God that Failed:
Even the Founding Fathers of the U.S., nowadays considered the model of a democracy, were strictly opposed to it. Without a single exception, they thought of democracy as nothing but mob-rule.
The true meaning of justice
As David Gordon and I have argued in our book Redressing Historical Injustice, the concept of justice that underpins the reparations claims is fatally flawed because it relies on injustice to achieve the justice it seeks. No just outcomes can be achieved through unjust methods. Basic principles of the rule of law such as the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof are founded on this premise—for justice to be done the methods of achieving justice must themselves be just. Mob rule and extortion through taxation are not just methods of achieving justice.
A further danger in the unjust levying of reparations taxes is that it will only give rise to new resentments, reopen dormant hostilities, and break fresh ground for racial animosity. This is no path to justice. For example, in California, the reparations legislation provides for “improving job opportunities, education, health care, and criminal justice for Black and low-income Californians.” Given that all Californians are paying to fund these programs, the prospect that they will all accept this unjust, race-based distribution of publicly-funded opportunities without demur seems unlikely. The case of “reparations for past housing discrimination” in Evanston, Illinois further illustrates this problem:
A lawsuit filed by a conservative activist group claims a Chicago suburb discriminated against residents who are not Black when it paid nearly $5 million in reparations to some Black residents in recent years as a part of an ongoing program.
Evanston, Illinois, in 2021 became the first city in America to offer reparations to Black Americans, including descendants of Black residents who lived in town between 1919 and 1969 when the city banned housing discrimination. The program has provided 193 residents subjected to discrimination with $25,000 each in housing relief.
Residents who are not black objected on the grounds that:
“The Evanston, Illinois’ ‘reparations’ program is nothing more than a ploy to redistribute tax dollars to individuals based on race,” wrote Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, in a news release on the group’s website. “This scheme unconstitutionally discriminates against anyone who does not identify as Black or African American. This class action, civil rights lawsuit will be a historic defense of our color-blind Constitution.”
With the litigation still in progress, it remains to be seen whether the courts will strike down these reparations schemes as unconstitutional. Many think there is hope for such an outcome given the rulings in the university admissions affirmative action cases. What remains clear is that creating new injustices against innocent white people is no way to redress old injustices against black people.
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