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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
15:55
Why Reparations Will Actually Hurt Black America
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I want to talk about the case for reparations.
Let me start over again.
I mean the case against reparations because it is a lame duck brain dead idea.
The idea that I should get money from people who were never slave owners and giving it to me who was never a slave is absurd.
Absolutely absurd.
Rashida Tlaib, the freshman congresswoman from Michigan, says her constituents want a check.
It is direct payment that people want to see, but also increase access to higher education, to real equitable funding and education systems right now across the country.
So it comes down to two questions, doesn't it?
Who pays and how much?
Let's deal with the first question.
Who pays?
As to who pays, the case for reparations was laid out by this guy named Tahisi Coates.
He is a writer for The Atlantic, and about three years ago he put out an article about the case for reparations, and it literally jump-started this whole conversation.
He testified last week at the reparations hearing, and here's what he said.
It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.
As historian Ed Baptist has written, enslavement, quote, shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of America, so that by 1836, more than 600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves.
By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America, $3 billion and $1860 more than all the other assets in the country combined.
The method of cultivating this asset was neither gentle cajoling nor persuasion, but torture, rape, and child trafficking.
Enslavement reigned for 250 years on these shores.
When it ended, this country could have extended its hallowed principles, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all regardless of color.
But America had other principles in mind.
And so for a century after the Civil War, black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror, a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader McConnell.
Speaking of Mitch McConnell, Mitch McConnell, not down with reparations.
Yeah, I don't think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.
McConnell is right.
What do people today have to do with the fact that my ancestors were slaves?
And by the way, the ugly part of human history is that slavery has been a part of it from the very beginning.
It's only been in the last 10,000 years or so that the idea of slavery has been reconsidered and the reconsideration occurred in the West.
Asians enslaved Asians, Caucasians enslaved Caucasians, Native Americans, or what we call Native Americans, enslaved Native Americans, blacks enslaved blacks.
In fact, the best evidence is that slavery was going on on the continent of Africa thousands of years before the Arab slavers got involved in slave trading and before the Europeans ever set foot on the continent.
In an article called, Six Inconvenient Truths About Slavery, conservative Michael Medved says this, The Romans seized so many captives from Eastern Europe that the terms Slav and slave bore the same origins.
All the great cultures of the ancient world, from Egypt to Babylonia, Athens to Rome, Persia to India to China, depended upon the brutal enslavement of the masses, often representing heavy majorities of the population.
Contrary to the glamorization of aboriginal New World cultures, the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas counted among the most brutal slave masters of them all, not only turning the members of other tribes into harshly abused beasts of burden, but also using these conquered enemies to feed a limitless lust for human sacrifice." End of quote.
Here's another inconvenient truth.
There were black slave owners.
There were about 250,000 blacks living in the South in 1860, and roughly 4,000 of them owned slaves.
Here's another inconvenient truth.
Native Americans, or what we call Native Americans, they also owned slaves.
Here's what historian Roger McGrath said.
Meanwhile, there were more than a quarter of a million free blacks in the South, and nearly 4,000 of them were slave masters who owned more than 20,000 black slaves.
Every one of the 13 states and most of the major cities that would become part of the Confederacy had substantial numbers of black slave owners.
New Orleans, by both numbers and by proportion, had the most.
A staggering 28% of free blacks in the Crescent City owned slaves.
If blacks owned thousands of black slaves, so too did American Indians.
By the middle of the 1700s, various tribes, especially the so-called five civilized tribes of the southeast, began to acquire black slaves.
By the end of the century, the Cherokee owned nearly a thousand, and the Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasee several thousand more.
The numbers grew sharply during the early 19th century.
When the tribes were removed to the Indian territory, mostly during the 1830s, they took thousands of black slaves with them.
Accompanying the Cherokee on their Trail of Tears were some 2,000 black slaves.
But understand this.
Most black slaves remained in Africa and served in servitude to their masters who were also black.
Of all of the slaves taken out of Africa by European slavers, only about 5% came directly to what we call North America.
Most went directly to the Caribbean or to Brazil.
And Arab slavers took more slaves out of Africa than did European slavers and did so far longer.
The Arab slave trade began around the 8th or 9th century.
The European slave trade didn't start until around the 15th or 16th century.
Also consider this.
The idea that slaves in America would have had a better time had they remained in Africa is also a myth.
These were Africans who were conquered by other Africans, put in servitude, and sold to either Arab slavers or European slavers.
But most black slaves who were conquered remained in Africa and served in bondage by other blacks in Africa.
Now back to the other big question, how much?
Bear in mind, only about 5% of whites have any sort of generational connection to slavery.
So we're asking those 5% of whites, presumably, to bear the burden.
How much should they pay?
At the very beginning, I told you about Ta-Nehisi Coates and his belief that the slave trade played a major role in the economy of the South.
There's an economist, however, who says, that's not so.
At the American Institute for Economic Research, Paul Magnus, an economic historian, explains the problem with Coates' claim.
Quote, Coates' number come from Cornell University historian Ed Baptiste's 2014 book, The Half Has Never Been Told.
In a key passage in the book, Baptiste purports to add up the total value of the economic activity that derived from cotton production, which at $77 million made up about 5% of the estimated GDP of the United States in 1836.
Baptiste then committed a fundamental accounting error.
He proceeded to double and even triple count the intermediate transactions involved in cotton production, things like land purchases for plantations, tools used for cotton production, transportation, insurance, and credit instruments used in each.
Eventually, that $77 million became $600 million in Baptiste accounting, or almost half of the entire antebellum economy of the United States.
There's a crucial problem with Baptiste's approach.
The calculation of GDP, the main formulation of national accounts, and a representation of the dollar amount of economic activity in a country in a given year only incorporates the value of final goods and services produced.
The rationale for doing so comes from accounting as the price of the final good already incorporates intermediate transactions that go into its production and distribution.
Baptiste numbers are not only wrong, they reflect a basic unfamiliarity with the meaning and definition of GDP. Here's the other problem.
We're assuming that the major problems facing the black community are a legacy of slavery.
Where's your proof?
The number one problem facing the black community is the absence of fathers.
And a hundred years ago, only about 20-25% of black kids were born outside of wedlock.
In some places, in some cities, census reports suggest that a black kid was slightly more likely to be born to a mother and father married than a white kid.
Now that number is almost 70%.
Unless you're prepared to say racism is bigger now than it was 100 years ago, you cannot pin that on slavery.
The implicit assumption here is that today's problems have to do with the legacy of slavery.
What's the proof?
Look at economics.
1940, 87% of blacks lived below the federally defined level of poverty.
1960, that number had fallen to 47%.
A 40-point drop without reparations, without set-asides, without race-based preferences.
A hundred years ago, it was rare for a black kid to be born outside of wedlock.
Maybe 20% or so of black kids were born outside of wedlock.
And there's some data in some cities that suggest a black kid was slightly more likely to be born to a mother and father married than a white kid.
In any case, it certainly was not as high as it is the 70% today.
Unless you're prepared to say that racism is greater today than it was a hundred years ago, how do you attribute the breakdown of the black family to racism?
The welfare state launched in 1965 with the best of intentions by Lyndon Johnson has incentivized women to marry the government and allowed men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility.
Another feel-good plan is race-based preferences, that is, lowering standards so that black and brown kids can get into a college or university that they otherwise would not be eligible to get into based upon grades and test scores.
What happens, though, is that it increases the likelihood that these kids are going to drop out.
And when they drop out, they incur greater student debt.
They're angry.
They feel, quite understandably, angry and confused about why the school admitted me when they knew I couldn't do the work.
And then there's the issue of licensing that a lot of people don't think about.
Are you aware of how many professions require people to get a license, professions that ought not even require a license?
I was in an Apple store several years ago, and I was waited on by a very talented young lady who happened to be black.
And I said, have you always been interested in computers and this sort of thing?
She said, oh, I'm not interested in this stuff at all.
I happen to be good at it.
I said, well, what do you want to do?
She said, I want to be a barber.
I said, a barber?
I have lots of friends who are barbers and lots of family members who are barbers, and they just cut hair.
I assume you know how to cut hair, don't you?
She said, oh yeah, that's not the issue.
I have brothers, and I cut their hair, but I have to get a license in order for me to open up a shop as a barber.
I said, get out of here.
You already know how to do it, and they're requiring you to get a license?
She said, yes.
I said, how much?
She said between three and five thousand dollars.
There are lots of instances like that where people otherwise would be involved in economic activity, productive economic activity, but they're required to get a license.
And then there are job killing policies like the minimum wage.
That's right, the minimum wage.
Do you know that a black teenager as compared to a white teenager, as compared to a black adult, as compared to a white adult, used to be the more likely of those four quadrants to be employed?
In comes the minimum wage in 1938, and they jack it up, and they jack it up.
At some point, a black person willing to bid for skills can't build at fair market value.
He has to bid at a higher fair market value when there are plenty of white people willing to do that job.
Milton Friedman, the economist, said this about the minimum wage.
The effects have been concentrated on the groups that the do-gooders would most like to help.
The people who have been hurt most by minimum wage laws are the blacks.
I have often said that the most anti-Negro law on the books of this land is the minimum wage rate.
Wow!
The most anti-Negro law on the statute books?
And then the welfare state!
That has incentivized women to marry the government and allowed men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility.
Don't get me started on government schools, where in the inner city there's often a 50% dropout rate, and among those who graduate many of them cannot read, write, and compute at grade level.
Licensing laws that require people to get expensive licenses to do something they already know how to do.
Add all these things up and I would argue they have a more powerful negative effect on the black community today than slavery did 150 years ago.
And now let me end with a very relevant and timely piece written by my friend economist Walter Williams on those who say that America was built on the backs of black slaves.
Here's what he said.
Reparations advocates make the unchallenged pronouncement that the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor.
That's utter nonsense.
While some slave owners became rich, slavery doesn't have a good record of producing wealth.
Slavery existed in the southern states and outlawed in most of the northern states.
Buying into the reparations argument suggests that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor.
The truth is just the opposite.
In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished.
Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent.
Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts.
When Frederick Douglass, who by the way was the most photographed man of the 19th century, not most photographed black man, most photographed man of the 19th century, when he escaped his plantation in Maryland and went to New Bedford, Massachusetts, he was shocked to see free black people more prosperous than some of the most prosperous slave owners, because he thought in order for a country to be wealthy, it had to have slaves.
Remember, most people didn't challenge slavery.
It wasn't until the West began to do it 10,000 years ago.
So that's the case against reparations.
Who pays?
How much?
And for how long?
And do you really think people like Maxine Waters, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the whole cabal of victocrats would be satisfied once they got a check, or would the demands simply be moved to another place?
I think they would.
I'm Larry Elder.
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