The Confederate Flag

[Umbran]

Cash, though, is always useful. At least with pure cash reparations, people have flexibility. Money could be used to buy a vehicle to get to a better job, farther away. It could be used as seed money for a business. It could be used to wipe out consumer debt.

It could even be used on ale & whores.

You smile, Danny, but you're actually eliding over a major point with the jest. Give someone a fish, and you feed them for a day...

Take a look at how efficiently and effectively people use "windfalls" - like big unexpected tax rebates, or lottery winnings. While, in theory, cash is always useful, documented human behavior suggests that as a practical matter, handing out wads of cash would not result in improvement in station for most of the folks in question. This suggests it is *not* economically more efficient to just give people cash, and doing so might actually yield something far from the intended results.

 

[billd91]

Yes and no. In your country Black Americans are statistically disadvantaged in terms of opportunity, education, pay, and so on, as well as having very low levels of inherited wealth. I know very little about Native Americans in the US, unfortunately, so I don't know whether the same holds true there.

The lot of Native Americans in the US is generally worse than Black Americans.

 

[billd91]

Forgive me for saying this, and with all due respect to everyone here who has been having a very intelligent, reasoned, and polite discussion about this...but I think it's time we move on as a nation and move past things that happened hundreds of years ago.

Wouldn't it be nice if that were possible. Except that the past affects an enormous amount of what's going on now and what will go on in the future. Privilege, of all sorts from economic to racial to gender and sexual preference, all derive from historical views, historical practices, historical events. How does "moving past" history ameliorate the pervasive problems history has created?

 

[tomBitonti]

My position: we'd be better off as minorities (in particular) and as a society (in general) if we took seriously the business of dismantling the institutionalized forms of white (and male) privilege...and with it, stopped rigging our version of capitalism to favor those who are already rich in order to increase economic mobility.

We can't reset the game to give everyone the same odds of success- to do so would be patently unfair and economically ruinous. But we CAN do a better job of making sure the game is fairer going forward.

This is mostly my position.

At the rate we seem to be slipping into privilege based on wealth, as opposed to simply on race, and looking at policy based racial problems (e.g., disproportionate penalties for different sorts of drugs, for example), I fear we are making very slow progress.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Raunalyn]

On ale & whores: if after the money was spent on that, if a dude was whining about the man holding him down, would it be legal to slap him silly? I imagine there'd be an anti-reparation contingent who thinks "they'd just waste it anyway".

Ale and whores are always an appropriate expenditure, good sir!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You smile, Danny, but you're actually eliding over a major point with the jest. Give someone a fish, and you feed them for a day...

Take a look at how efficiently and effectively people use "windfalls" - like big unexpected tax rebates, or lottery winnings. While, in theory, cash is always useful, documented human behavior suggests that as a practical matter, handing out wads of cash would not result in improvement in station for most of the folks in question. This suggests it is *not* economically more efficient to just give people cash, and doing so might actually yield something far from the intended results.

Oh, I know I'm glossing over it. One of my major areas of study in economics & law was dealing with economic windfalls- especially lottery winnings and court judgements. I've also dealt with these issues up close & personal.

Even though the windfalls typically disappear within a 5 year period- which has prompted all kinds of legal developments which are applicable- the person receiving it is at least better off in the short run.

Because those lottery windfalls disappeared so quickly, commissions recognized a PR problem: ticket sales dropped. Thus, many commissions got laws passed requiring winners to take a state-funded & operated crash course in personal finances management before a check would be cut.

In another realm of windfalls are inheritances & similar gifts...with similar evaporation issues.

One tool used to prevent/mitigate that evaporation is the HEW (health, education, welfare) trust. Funds in a HEW can only be used for trust beneficiary expenses in one of those categories, and the trustee is the gatekeeper. As such, the money is protected not only from profligate spending by the beneficiary, but also from most creditors and even judicial decrees.

Thing is, even though both the crash course and HEWs would be useful here, the practicality of using either tool would be an open question.

 

[MechaPilot]

There isn't a modern country of Rome, or any country which goes by that name.

Yeah sorry. I meant Italy. I'm still a little addled from the cold medicine.

 

[tuxgeo]

I agree. I'm not sure reparations are the best solution either. But even other moves at amelioration, like Affirmative Action, are under consistent political attack as "reverse discrimination". So I think there needs to be some upping of the ante to get a successful solution in the works.

Instead of an "upping of the ante," how about a change of strategy? The shoveling of money toward problems has a spotty record in terms of actually solving the target problems, after all.

Many different factors can contribute in various ways to the lower economic and social status of a defined group of people, so it can become difficult to know which causes are root and which causes are incidental to the observed lower status of such a group.

The late Senator Dan'l P. Moynihan famously said that the dissolution of the black family was one of the contributing causes of the decline in the success and status of black populations -- meaning that a cultural shift was at least partly to blame. If that's so, then it seems to me that our history of slavery in the U.S. isn't our only error, and it isn't the only thing for the correction or amelioration of which new policies should be adopted. (It's harder to fix the problem when you don't know what the real problem is.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Reparations are not about solving a problem. They're a bit of societal and political theater, namely, giving money as an apology.

Think of it like a court judgement. Many can't make you whole, they do not solve your problems. They monetize your damages and then award you the money.

 

[Enkhidu]

...My position: we'd be better off as minorities (in particular) and as a society (in general) if we took seriously the business of dismantling the institutionalized forms of white (and male) privilege...and with it, stopped rigging our version of capitalism to favor those who are already rich in order to increase economic mobility.

I can't express how much I agree with this sentiment. There's a reason I want to kill the capital gains tax rate with fire.