Reparations: Who Should Pay?

In their never-ending effort to Balkanize America and buy black votes by stealing from all taxpayers, including black ones, the Democrats are reviving their call for reparations for slavery. After all, with blacks waking up to the fact that Democrats are doing nothing for them, a new bribe appears to be necessary. Given that there are no living Americans who were slaves or who owned slaves, it's clear that the idea of reparations has nothing to do with justice or concern for blacks; it's just another political effort to bribe voters with other people's money – just like Paul Ryan trying to ensure the unending flow of Koch brothers money into Republican coffers by bringing in lots of cheap foreign labor.

But let's for a moment pretend that the whole idea of reparations for blacks, but not all the other groups who've been discriminated against, like, say, the Irish, makes sense. The first question is, who should be paid? Obviously not blacks like Obama, who have not a drop of slave blood. The government would have to spend a fortune to find out what percentage of slave blood black Americans had to see how much each was owned. But it's worse than that. If someone is 50% white and 50% black slave ancestry, how much does white privilege offset the debt owed due to slavery? Leftists will argue that since blacks have suffered persecution after slavery ended, all blacks should be reimbursed. That's an interesting point, so long as we ignore all the other "types" of Americans ranging from the Irish to the Japanese who have been persecuted, which we'll come back to in a bit. The second question we'd need to ask is, who should pay? After all, if you're on the sidewalk of an intersection where a drunk runs a red light and slams into another car, the drunk's victims can't sue you because you were in the area, the car manufacturer because they made money when the drunk bought their car, or the city because without the drunk's tax dollars the city wouldn't have put in the light that the drunk ran. The victims can sue only the person who caused their suffering: the drunk. There is one group without which there couldn't have been a slave trade or a plantation society in the South; that group also profited from selling blacks. That's the Africans who sold their fellow blacks into slavery. Whites didn't go to Africa armed with big nets and hunt slaves as they hunted big game; whites bought the slaves from black Africans. Unfortunately, black Africans violate the first rule of ambulance-chasing attorneys: don't sue anyone who can't pay for your next Ferrari. Hence, we can't bribe black voters...er, fairly compensate black Americans for the suffering of their great, great grandparents by taking money from black Africans. This brings up an interesting thought: isn't the fact that America is working hard to end racial discrimination a form of reparations? Think about it: if those great, great grandparents hadn't been sold into slavery, many black Americans would be black Africans. But even poor blacks in the U.S. are living better lives than the average black African, so the fact that the U.S. didn't ship blacks back to Africa can be considered a form of reparations – especially today, when pretty much everyone wants to get into America. But that's crazy talk according to leftists, since they "know" that things that don't buy black votes don't count. The next two obvious groups are the folks who ran the slave trade and the slave-owners, but they are all long dead. As of yet, leftists haven't proposed robbing their graves for gold fillings, though now that the idea has been mentioned, it won't be long before some leftist, probably on The View, advocates it. This brings us back to the fact that blacks weren't suddenly treated fairly the day that the South surrendered. Perhaps we should look at the group that fought the Civil War to keep slavery legal, the group that founded the KKK, the group that passed all the racist Jim Crow laws in the South, the group that fought to keep schools segregated, the group that passed a welfare plan that destroyed black families, the group that has supported genocide against black people – according to Jesse Jackson – the group that ignores thousands of blacks being shot each year in cities that it runs, the group that wants to deny inner-city blacks a decent education...that's right, the Democrats! From its founding by a slave-owner to its fighting any effort to move blacks out of poverty or to help blacks be all they can be, the Democratic Party has led the charge to ensure that blacks are discriminated against and marginalized in America. Democrats have discriminated against other groups, such as the Japanese-Americans put in prison camps during WWII and modern Asian-Americans who are discriminated against in college admissions, but their main effort has been to keep blacks down. The obvious answer to the question of who should pay for the injustices imposed on blacks in America is the people who called for, passed into law, and enforced the policies that discriminated against and oppressed black Americans. They're the drunk driver who caused blacks to suffer, hence they should be made to pay for black suffering. An added advantage of making Democrats pay is that since their policies have persecuted blacks right up to the present time, we won't have to figure out what percentage of slave blood blacks have when we divvy up the money. Every Democratic politician should have to put 10% of his after-tax income each year into a reparations fund that will be distributed to all blacks. Every registered Democrat voter – except for blacks, of course – will have to pay $100 every time he votes – including in primaries – which will also be placed into the reparations fund. Clearly, this is the only way that the injustice perceived by leftists can be addressed. Making all Americans, the vast majority of whom never had anything to do with slavery, pay is absurd. Can you imagine making the descendants of a man who died in the Union Army to end slavery pay reparations? Wasn't his giving his life to free blacks reparations enough? The good news is that now if leftists do manage to vote in reparations, which could happen if we let them win the House in the fall, we'll know where they need to go to get the money to pay for it. You can read more of Tom's rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.