Few ideas pushed by the Left are as ridiculous as reparations.
Think about what the argument actually requires. People who never committed slavery are supposed to hand over money to people who never experienced slavery, all in the name of correcting history. That has never made sense to me. I had no role in slavery. I didn’t write the laws that permitted it, participate in the system that enforced it, or make a single decision that caused it. Yet I’m supposed to accept a financial obligation for something done by other people centuries ago. How does responsibility for someone else’s actions become mine simply because politicians have decided it should?
You won’t get a coherent answer from the reparations crowd.
That’s where the Left’s reasoning becomes particularly strange. And I’m being generous by calling it reasoning.
A teenager smashes windows and loots a store during a riot, and suddenly the conversation isn’t about the person who destroyed someone else’s business. We’re told to consider his frustration, his neighborhood, or some larger social injustice that supposedly explains what he did. The store owner who spent twenty years building that business becomes an afterthought. Responsibility gets redirected everywhere except toward the person who actually picked up the brick.
But when we’re talking about something that happened generations ago, suddenly responsibility becomes hereditary. Now I’m responsible. My sons are apparently responsible too. We’re expected to answer for terrible things committed throughout Western history by people we’ve never met.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELHow exactly does that work?
Still, there’s something useful about these arguments. Sometimes the best way to expose a ridiculous standard is to apply that exact standard to the people promoting it.
So, I would say that Muslims who came here to the United States after 9/11 should be held to the same standard and have to pay for the victims of 9/11. I’m not trying to make 9/11 light-hearted here; to the contrary, I am trying to point out that you have to demonstrate absurdity by being absurd.
And if the Democratic Party continues to push for reparations for slavery, then I think it should be the Democratic Party that has the financial obligation for reparations. After all, at the beginning of the Civil War, every slave was owned by a Democrat. There was not a single Republican who owned a slave. The Democratic Party controlled slavery until after the Civil War, when the Republicans ended it.
And doesn’t it seem strange that the reparations crowd is going after all Americans to pay reparations instead of the guilty Democratic Party? That’s when Democrats will start to bark that slavery was the law and so committing slavery was legal.
And then we have to look at what percentage of Americans owned slaves at the time the Civil War broke out in 1861.
The 1860 Census recorded approximately:
- 31.4 million people in the United States
- 393,975 slaveholders
- 3.95 million enslaved people
That works out to about 1.25% of the total U.S. population being recorded as slaveholders. If you exclude enslaved people from the denominator and consider the free population, it’s about 1.4%.
It’s no wonder the reparations crowd wants you to believe that everyone owned a slave. It is intended to increase the guilt factor on their financial prey. Yet out of the entire U.S. population, only one and a quarter percent owned slaves. That means that 98.75% of Americans did not own slaves. And yet, they want all of America to pay reparations to people who were never a part of that 1.25%. Isn’t that odd?
And yet, the other scenarios that are just as outrageous as reparations are thought to be totally ridiculous.
Apparently, collective responsibility is acceptable only when the right people are subjected to it.
We see the same mentality after mass shootings.
Someone commits a horrific crime with a gun, and somehow firearms owned by millions of Americans who had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting become part of the indictment. My guns are in my closets and drawers, inside gun safes, yet I’m told I am part of the problem because I won’t surrender them to the government.
And what exactly am I supposed to receive in return? A vague promise that the police will protect me. I’ve already seen how reassuring that promise can be, especially when the same politicians who are fighting to defund the police want to take away your firearms and self-protection at the same time.
It’s no different when the Biden administration kept pushing the idea that white supremacy was the worst problem facing America. They pushed that idea because the left tries to claim that white supremacists are all conservative MAGA people. So they targeted conservative whites in America for being white supremacists when it’s the furthest thing from the truth.
You can’t build a serious moral standard around selective guilt. It just doesn’t work.
If we’re going to hold people responsible for things other people did generations before they were even born, then that rule has to apply to everyone. You can’t suddenly change the rules just because applying them to someone else makes things uncomfortable.
Either collective blame applies to everyone, or it applies to no one. There isn’t a third option.
#reparations #collectiveguilt #politics
