Slavery Reparations and Morality
Slavery was a moral wrong. It can be maintained that the US owes Blacks reparations for Slavery on moral grounds independent of the economic impacts of Slavery. Moral debts are paid in many ways. A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, blood for blood.
http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm 558,052 Americans died in the Civil War there were 412,175+ wounded totaling 970,227 casualties. Some people estimate 700,000 dead. 116,708 Americans died in WWI. 407,316 Americans died in WWII. 33,651 Americans died in the Korean War. 58,168 Americans died in Vietnam. The population of the US during the Civil War was 34.3 millions. One American in every 61 was killed. The population during WWII was 133.5 millions. One American in every 327 was killed. Add in the wounded, frequently crippled for life by amputation and one person in 35 was killed or wounded during the Civil War. Comparing Vietnam, one American in 1336 was killed or wounded. The US paid a horrific price in blood to end Slavery. No nation in history paid a greater, more painful price, to end Slavery.
Some people will say that the Civil War was not about slavery. Lincoln in his second inaugural address said,
“These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.”
Lincoln continued to say this,
“The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."“
The enormous bloody cost of the Civil War was seen as a moral expiation of the sin of Slavery. It was paid, and the figures show that it was paid in full. There is no Moral debt remaining for slavery. 558,052 Americans paid that debt with their lives. This is almost twice as many dead Americans as there were slaves imported into this country and it does not count all the injured in the Civil War.
There is neither a moral nor an economic justification for Slavery Reparations. The idea of Slavery Reparations has its origins in Slave Culture, it strengthens those Slave Behaviors which survive with other remnants of Slave Culture in Black America today, and it is crippling Blacks in the US today.
There is another moral issue involved with slavery reparations. Who living today is morally responsible for paying them? The vast majority of Americans today are descendants of immigrants who arrived after slavery was abolished. The North had a much larger population than the South prior to the Civil War. More Americans are descended from them than from White Southerners and relatively few Whites owned slaves even in the South. According to an NPR program on the 4th of July one of the reasons that Benjamin Franklin supported the Revolution was that the Irish were more oppressed and degraded in Ireland under the English than Blacks were in the South during the Slave period. Serfdom lasted in Eastern Europe from which many of our immigrants came until the same period that slavery was abolished in the US and in some areas even longer. Is it morally just to make the descendants of the whites whose ancestral relatives died to end slavery in the US pay reparations? Is it morally right to require the descendants of whites whose ancestors lived in slave like conditions in Europe during the slave period to pay reparations? Is it even right to require that extremely small fraction of whites who are descended from people who actually owned slaves to pay reparations for something their distant ancestors did? The answer to all these questions is no.
To force these people to pay reparations would increase racial tension and make Blacks hated by all the other races in the US.
The idea of Slavery Reparations is a violation of the fundamental natural law which underlies the right to property, liberty, etc. That is that there should be some relationship to what you do and the result. The people living today did not have anything to do with slavery. They never participated in it, and they cannot be held accountable for it.