In any liberal-libertarian conception of justice, there is no doubt that a liberated slave had a moral right to compensation from his master. From an economic viewpoint (what is possible and at what cost), the problem is more complex, especially across generations. In response to an article in The Economist, I would propose two arguments against reparation payments to today’s descendants of the slaves of several generations ago. These arguments suggest a new approach for effective and moral reparations.
The first argument is an economic argument: measuring the compensation due to the slaves’ descendants is impossible. Academic estimates of the harm done to American slaves range from 0.7% to 37% of today’s GDP (that is, of what American residents produce and earn in one year). But the problem is more serious than this range suggests.
Assuming we know for sure that a certain individual is a descendant of an American slave, we still face radical uncertainty as to whether or not the descendant himself was actually harmed. What is the counterfactual? His first slave ancestor brought to America would likely not have come here otherwise. There is a good chance that today’s slave descendant would have been born in Africa if he had been born at all. As late as 1950, life expectancy at birth in Africa was 37 years, compared to 68 (at that time) in the United States. We don’t know and have no way to know if today’s slave descendant would be alive and better off if his first ancestor had not been kidnapped and brought to America as a slave.
I sidestep the difficult philosophical question of whether an individual counterfactually born elsewhere—or even conceived in slightly different circumstances in the same bed—can be said to be the same individual. From a purely naturalist viewpoint, it would seem that the answer is negative, which would refute my counterfactual argument. But we would still don’t know how to calculate meaningful figures for the reparations. (Another issue raised by The Economist is whether they should be paid in some sort of affirmative-action services or in cash.)
The second argument is a moral argument, which is not surprising as welfare economics has shown that any government policy must ultimately rely on a value judgment about distribution. The argument is that there is no moral justification for forcing an individual living today to pay for his ancestors’ crimes. Collective guilt is indefensible. A cogent moral argument could be made for reparations from an identifiable individual of today only if it could be proven that he owes part of his wealth to an identifiable ancestor who exploited an identifiable slave whose current descendant will be the recipient of the reparation payment. Such a calculation is impossible.
The moral case would of course have been different when slaves were liberated in 1865 as their masters could be immediately identified. As time passes, the claims become unprovable and moot.
This being said, one may argue that some of the slaves’ descendants are currently being exploited by some of the descendants of slave owners (and probably by some slave descendants too). From a moral viewpoint, this current injustice by current perpetrators should of course be corrected. This leads to an indirect reparation path very different and more practical than what is currently being proposed.
It is possible that the slavery heritage of black Americans has helped keep them in (relative) poverty, if only because of the legal discrimination they have suffered until just a few generations ago. It is quite clear that the individuals responsible for maintaining laws that continue restraining economic opportunities for Blacks should cease doing so. There are at least four regulatory areas where the poor, including descendants of former slaves, are being continuously exploited by currently living Americans.
1) Zoning regulations.—Zoning regulation started in NYC in 1916 to prevent Blacks and immigrants from moving into white neighborhoods as the free market allowed them to do with their dollars and the beneficial greed of property owners. In his recent book A Republic of Equals (Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 196), Jonathan Rothwell illustrates “the tension between market forces and racism” with a quote from a New York real estate agent, found in the New York Times of August 4, 1898:
I assure you there is no sentiment about the property owners bringing colored people here. It is purely a matter of dollars and cents and self-interest. The negroes pay their rent regularly, and many of the white people do not.
Although zoning regulations are not explicitly racist anymore, they have a similar effect by artificially increasing house prices and apartment rents. (See my Regulation review of Rothwell’s book.) Terminating zoning bylaws would substitute partly for impossible and unethical reparation payments.
2) Licensure laws.—Occupational licensure now forces one-fourth of Americans to obtain costly (in time or money) licenses before they can offer their services. They curb the ability of the poorest individuals to compete on the market—not to mention the increased prices they have to pay for the services of licensed professionals. Terminating licensure laws would indirectly provide compensation to individuals, including descendants of former slaves, who are victims of a kind of government discrimination on the entrepreneurial market.
3) Minimum wage laws.—Minimum wage laws prevent the employment of those whose productivity is lower than the fixed minimum. These people pushed out of employment include the poorest and, no doubt within them, many slave descendants. (The unemployment rate of Blacks is typically above that of Whites, Asians, and Hispanic.) Supporters and beneficiaries of minimum wage laws are exploiters who owe reparations, but the practical solution would be to abolish these wage controls.
4) Drug prohibitions for adults and other victimless crimes.—Laws that create victimless crimes—such as those banning some drugs—have two effects for our purposes: first, they create underground markets that are tempting for the poorest workers; second, they give the police more opportunities to discriminate against some minorities.
Since most of these discriminatory laws exist at the local or state level, the reforms would be difficult, slow, and perhaps always incomplete. But instead of confiscating money from current taxpayers as a punishment for something they never did, the federal government could play a useful role by promoting these economically and morally justifiable policies.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Hutcheson
Jul 7 2020 at 10:36am
Strong agreement with all but for #3 I would amend it to say to substitute a wage subsidy such as a higher EITC and to shift SS/Medicare financing from a wage tax to a consumption tax for minimum wage laws.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 7 2020 at 12:38pm
@Thomas Hutcheson: That would no doubt be better than the current system. But Georgist land taxes would quite certainly be preferable to consumption taxes.
Jens
Jul 7 2020 at 10:52am
Would you drop or withdraw any of these proposal if there had been no slavery ?
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 7 2020 at 12:20pm
@Jens: No. But past official discrimination against some minorities makes them even more defendable. And who knows, it may make them easier to sell?
Floccina
Jul 7 2020 at 11:58am
In lieu (BTW why is English spelling so perverse, should be loo or lew?) of reparation how about making US citizenship transferable and saleable. My Honduran sister-in-law, a cardiologist, would pay big money to get US citizenship.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 7 2020 at 12:35pm
@Floccina: Interesting idea, but why is it never discussed? (There must be some literature on this, isn’t there?) One reason, of course, is that people who believe in “price gouging” laws and, like in the 18th century, are up in arms against “hoarders and speculators” would have problems just thinking about the idea. On the other hand, what would be the consequences of letting people bid up (or down) the price of citizenship? A beneficial consequence would no doubt be to allow your sister-in-law to come. Less beneficial consequences (from a libertarian-liberal viewpoint) would be to have all sorts of rich government cronies and exploiters in foreign countries, including Russian oligarchs, replace lots of poor Americans, Blacks and Whites, for whom the opportunity cost of American citizenship would increase. Given this, it is not immediately clear what the market price of American citizenships would reveal.
robc
Jul 7 2020 at 1:38pm
St Kitts & Nevis and Dominica sell citizenship. It is a different idea than a citizen selling his citizenship to someone else, but maybe the US should consider that too.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 7 2020 at 2:07pm
Other states sell citizenship indirectly, and nicely leave the benefits to their citizens. The French state is an example. If you marry a French woman (or a Frenchman if you are into that instead), you can nearly automatically obtain French (and European) citizenship without living in France. However, you have to pay for the woman (or the man); more precisely, since slavery does not exist, you have to pay the transaction costs of discovery, flirt, and marriage. In the case of French citizenship, there is another transaction cost: you need to speak French—above pillow talk level.
Jon Murphy
Jul 7 2020 at 1:11pm
That’s because English doesn’t so much as borrow from other languages as it does follow them into dark alleys, beats them up, and rifles through their pockets for spare syntax and grammar 🙂
I believe lieu is a Latin word we just co-opted.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 7 2020 at 1:35pm
@Jon: Lieu is actually a French word, from the Latin locus (not to be confused with locust, which refers to politicians and bureaucrats!). In English, locus has produced other words such as location.
Jon Murphy
Jul 7 2020 at 2:44pm
I stand corrected! Thanks!
nobody.really
Jul 9 2020 at 11:10am
Oh, please–what qualifications does a guy named Pierre Lemieux have to opine on whether “lieu” is French?
nobody.really
Jul 10 2020 at 11:13am
“The seventeenth-century grammarian Alexander Gil–at one time schoolmaster to young John Milton–was convinced that English was going to Hell in a handcart. Being precluded, for obvious reasons, from blaming the Yanks, the trade unions, the comprehensive schools or the BBC, he blamed Geoffrey Chaucer, then comfortably in his grave for more than two hundred years. Chaucer, it seems, had by his practice promoted the vicious habit of using French words.”
Walter Nash, An Uncommon Tongue: The Uses and Resources of English 185-86 (1992).
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 10 2020 at 5:20pm
nobody.really: Interesting. In the 17th and 18th century, French was the lingua franca, so it is not surprising that English (and I assume other languages) would borrow terms from it. Now, English is the lingua franca and French borrows from it. Gilat must be jumping in his grave (if his bones are not too fragile).
In fact, up to the late 19th century at least, French remained an important language of diplomacy. The March 30, 1867 treaty whereby the US government purchased Alaska from the Russian government was in written in both English and French.
Michael Pettengill
Jul 7 2020 at 1:57pm
Low productivity jobs are the jobs white workers can’t do, or refuse to do because the work is too hard?
Caring for the infirm, helpless, who can’t care for themselves.
Harvesting food, preparing food, so white workers can eat too much food at low prices using government funding of their white consumption via unemployment, food stamps, welfare denied or greatly restricted to non-white people who refuse to work at low wages.
And businesses want more “low productivity workers” as customers because they locate their stores far from where these workers live?
Economies are zero sum.
If businesses believe low labor costs are ideal, businesses would want all their customers to be low income workers.
Unless businesses want government to put high incomes into their customer pockets so businesses never need to put any money into their customer pockets….
Non-whites are selected by many whites to be forced into doing the work white people can’t or won’t do, and many methods have been used. Like killing, burning, terrorizing, non-whites, especially blacks.
Note, many non-whites, especially blacks, live in poverty in areas with no zoning, but whites ensure the cheap housing costs more for non-whites than for whites by rigging “competitive free market” schemes like credit ratings.
Not everyone works and lives in cities. If rural conservative pols provided such great opportunities on an objective basis, why aren’t blacks and non-whites doing far better in rural areas than in cities, with non-whites in cities fleeing to rural America and greatly boosting the economic future of rural America?
john hare
Jul 7 2020 at 5:57pm
Are you listing talking points some use, or is this what you believe?
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 7 2020 at 7:54pm
Good question, @john hare! I do encourage our reader @Michael Pettengill to come often to this blog, where he can learn some economics.
Max More
Jul 7 2020 at 4:50pm
The call for reparations to “black” people by “white” people is racist. Apart from the points made in this post, almost no one is pointing out that a large proportion of slaves from Africa were sold to slavers by other black Africans. It was often used as a form of punishment within the tribe and common to dispose of people from other tribes. Slavery still goes in some places in Africa. It’s tough to trace lines of responsibility and benefit but you might find it a little easier in some Africa nations.
Mark Z
Jul 7 2020 at 5:55pm
To the extent that it’s philosophically absurd to consider the counterfactual scenario for individuals today had slavery not happened, I think the idea of reparations itself becomes absurd. Reparations for a crime depend on a valid counterfactual. How much worse off is the victim than they would have been had the crime not been committed. If the descendants of slaves only exist because the crime was committed, then it’s impossible to assess what they’re “owed,” IMO. How much would they pay never to have been born? (obviously there are philosophical problems with assessing how much better or worse off a person is for having been born). I think this is a general flaw in arguments for reparations, they tend to have ‘anthropic principle’ type problems once one abandons racial collectivism and regards people as individuals.
Another factor not mentioned though is the question of whether slavery (or racial discrimination in general) has been destructive or reallocative. Proponents of reparations always seems to assume slavery/discrimination are reallocative: non-black people enjoy advantages (privilege) at the expense of black people. It’s assumed to be a zero sum game. This is true if one subscribes to the ‘new history of capitalism’ narrative that slavery was enormously economically productive. But many economists have argued the opposite, that slavery was destructive; that on net, it did not benefit non-slave-owners (and inasmuch as individual fortunes have withered in the last 160 years, may not even benefit descendants of slave owners on average), and may have disadvantaged them, even if less so than slaves themselves. If this is the case, then reparations are not analogous to making A return to B something A’s ancestor took from B’s ancestor; rather, it is analogous to making A compensate B for a crime committed against B by a third party, even if the crime itself rendered A’s own ancestor (and consequently A) slightly worse off rather than better off.
Obviously, slavery or racial discrimination can be both destructive and reallocative, but there’s undeniably a destructive component to it (a dead weight loss), so an outcome gap between, say, white people and black people cannot be assumed to be equivalent to an advantage enjoyed by white people at black people’s expense, as is often assumed. And I think there’s an argument that these phenomena have been more destructive than reallocative, and perhaps even that non-slave owners have not in net benefitted at all, on average.
I really don’t think the moral argument for reparations can survive in any case if one consistently accepts moral individualism and rejects the notion of hereditary guilt.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 7 2020 at 8:04pm
@Mark Z: Good points, which make any meaningful comparison even more impossible (even if one assumed that collective sins exist). What do you mean by “they tend to have ‘anthropic principle’ type problems once one abandons racial collectivism and regards people as individuals”?
Mark Z
Jul 8 2020 at 4:45pm
Thanks. I meant meant problems related the notion that certain characteristics of a person may be prior to – and more essential than – their very existence. Seemed analogous to debates over the anthropic principle, but in retrospect it may not be a good analogy.
nobody.really
Jul 8 2020 at 4:20pm
Indeed, to measure damages, it makes sense to consider the counterfactual. And in the case of US slavery,
The US didn’t begin it. Slavery predated the founding of the nation. Thus, it is unclear to what extent the US should be liable. Perhaps the descendants of slaves should seek compensation from Britain?
2. The principle agents of slavery were private parties. True, US government entities enforced slavery much as it enforced other property rights. But how much liability should the US bear for that? The police will generally enforce prohibitions on trespass, even when the people who own the land being trespassed are arguably engaged in antisocial behavior. The landowners, not the police, are liable for the landowner’s conduct.
(True, Britain outlawed slavery before the US did. Thus the US arguably harmed slaves by separating from Britain, thereby delaying the date of their emancipation. But the counterfactual is tricky. If Britain had continued to own its North American colonies, it would have had a much stronger incentive to maintain the institution of slavery. So again, it becomes difficult to know what would have happened if….)
3. Thus, arguably the liable party should not be the US government, but the descendants of the wrongful private parties, the slave owners. And here’s where things REALLY get tricky: Given the amount of sexual relations/rape between owners and slaves, the descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave-owners are often the same people. To some extent, this kind of reparations would entail a person taking money out of his left pocket and putting it into his right.
Mark Z
Jul 8 2020 at 5:06pm
About 2, I agree, it’s possible Britain would’ve been less likely to outlaw slavery in the colonies had the US not seceded, especially since Britain was somewhat sympathetic to the confederacy early in the war. The counterfactual might parallel just what we saw within the US: states where slavery wasn’t very useful tended toward abolition much sooner than states that benefitted from it.
And yeah, it’s difficult to assign liability to descendants in general for a host of reasons. There may be some clear cases where, say, my grandfather stole a specific object from your grandfather, which I now own, where I’m morally obligated to give the object to you. But what if my grandfather stole $100,000 from yours, but then gambled it all away? One might argue that money is fungible, and he would’ve instead gambled away the 100,000 he already had that he ultimately passed on to me, but that’s somewhat speculative. What if he used the stolen 100k to start a restaurant that I inherited, but that didn’t necessarily leave me any better off, because had I not inherited the restaurant I would’ve become a lawyer or something and been just as successful? The expropriated value indirectly affects the decisions of future generations and get mingled with their labor in ways that can make restitution morally problematic once we deviate from the simple case of one’s ancestor stealing a specific object, or specific amount of cash that was then just left in a safe for generations.
Mark Brady
Jul 8 2020 at 2:28am
Pierre, I have three thoughts to share with you. We should distinguish between reparations and restitution. If fifty years ago I stole your car, I suggest that I owe you restitution today even if you are healthier not having a car and are now alive as a result of your active lifestyle. What do you think that the French government should do now (2020) in view of the fact that France forced Haiti to pay compensation, i.e., the interest and principal on the debt that was issued to the former slaveholders? Payment finally ceased around the time when you and I were born! To this day the French government refuses to make any reimbursement to Haiti or the Haitian people.According to Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology (2019/2020), who cites a work in French (and I have no reason to doubt the truth of what he writes), Alexis de Tocqueville was sympathetic to the idea that the former slaves in French colonies pay compensation to their former owners. And he wasn’t the only member of the French legislature to do so!
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 8 2020 at 11:01am
@Mark: Good point about the distinction between restitution and reparations, but I think my two arguments (economic/calculation and moral) apply to both across generations. “The people” is not the same people when not a single individual is the same one.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 8 2020 at 12:45pm
@Mark: On second thought, I am not sure anymore there is a useful distinction between restitution and reparations. Aren’t they both what is meant by “compensation” as Rothbard used the term in The Ethics of Liberty (p. 74)? As in torts, the goal is to “make whole” the harmed party, which, it seems to me, can be called either restitution or reparations. Do you care to elaborate?
Mark Brady
Jul 11 2020 at 2:59pm
Sometimes the two words, restitution and reparations, are used as synonyms. However, much of the time the word “restitution” is used in the context of one individual making good to another, and the word “reparations” is used in the context of a people making good to another, e.g., post-WWII German reparations to Israel, or the proposal that U.S. society should compensate the descendants of slaves.
Mark Brady
Jul 8 2020 at 12:56pm
Pierre concludes, ““The people” is not the same people when not a single individual is the same one.”
May I assume that this final sentence is intended to be a rebuttal to my statement that “To this day the French government refuses to make any reimbursement to Haiti or the Haitian people”? If so, I’m not convinced that it is a satisfactory rebuttal. And what if I were to rephrase my statement thus, “To this day the French government refuses to make any reimbursement to Haiti,” (and omit “or the Haitian people”). And if your response is, “Quite right too!” what is the implication for the rights and wrongs of any sovereignty paying the principal or interest on its national debt?
And do you have any thoughts on M. Alexis de Tocqueville’s view that the former slaves should compensate their erstwhile owners?
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 8 2020 at 10:51pm
@Mark Brady: Would you explain what exactly the Haitian government reimbursed the French government for? I know nothing about what Tocqueville thought about these issues.
More generally, the state claims to have (among many other “sovereign” rights) the right to renege on its debt even when it acknowledges the debt. It seems to me difficult to argue that lenders to the sovereign state, who take their chances in full knowledge of this, have a strong moral claim to reimbursement. It is even more difficult to argue that the exploited subjects of a state have any moral obligation to reimburse the state creditors that facilitated their repression. Any difficulty of these moral issues is obliterated by the impossibility, as time passes, to know who has harmed whom among the currently living.
Or perhaps I miss something in your argument?
nobody.really
Jul 10 2020 at 6:24am
“As the mayor of Minneapolis from 2014 to 2018, as a Minneapolis City Council member from 2006 until 2014 and as a white Democrat, I can say this: White liberals, despite believing we are saying and doing the right things, have resisted the systemic changes our cities have needed for decades. We have mostly settled for illusions of change….
These efforts make us feel better about racism, but fundamentally change little for the communities of color whose disadvantages often come from the hoarding of advantage by mostly white neighborhoods.
[T]he white liberals I represented as a Council member and mayor were very supportive of summer jobs programs that benefited young people of color. I also saw them fight every proposal to fundamentally change how we provide education to those same young people. They applauded restoring funding for the rental assistance hotline. They also signed petitions and brought lawsuits against sweeping reform to zoning laws that would promote housing affordability and integration.
Nowhere is this dynamic of preserving white comfort at the expense of others more visible than in policing.”
Betsy Hodges, former mayor of Minneapolis, MN
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