Racial Reparations Solve Nothing

The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee issued a report last week requesting that every black resident be paid $5 million and all personal debts be forgiven. Their rationale was broad – as it had to be, since California was founded as a free state: “While neither San Francisco, nor California, formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of Black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement.” 

This reasoning serves the same purpose as the catch-all term “equity” Popularly loved by the Left. It conflates specific harms from deliberate policies – which deserve redress – with vague societal ills that indirectly and unverifiably impact the specific life paths of individuals. Social engineering can be used to correct every instance of social inequalities between blacks and whites.

This is bad social science and bad ethics. It’s bad ethics because the innocent should not be forced to pay people against whom they have not sinned, and because the connection between continued suffering and past discrimination must be measured and clarified rather than merely assumed. It’s bad social science because it ignores the role of individual decision-making in persistent intergenerational inequality, despite the massive intervention of state, local and federal government.

Simply put, the preferred solution of San Francisco’s reparations committee – simply cutting checks – has been a dramatic failure in the United States. Lyndon Baines Johnson, President of Howard University in 1965, stated that he desired to promote widespread redistribution to correct the racial injustices of the past. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.’”

Redistribution programs have been a major focus of the federal government in the United States. The Federal Government has spent over $25 trillion to achieve this goal. It has not been a good result: While the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans is only 4-to-1, post-transfer taxes and taxes the gap between the richest and poorest Americans is approximately $50,000. However, the wealth gap between black Americans and white Americans has risen from roughly $50,000 in 1960 to well over $130,000 in 2016. Why? It turns out that public policies designed to reduce inequality also help alleviate the effects of poor decision-making. If we assume that all inequality is inequity, then solving inequality should solve inequity – but if it turns out that a great deal of inequality is the result of bad decision-making, then inequality cannot be solved by simply helicoptering money to those at the bottom end of the economic ladder.

The Left does exactly that. They then wonder why intergenerational wealth creation is not closing the racial divide. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that 70% of black children are born to unwed mothers; nearly 8 out of 100 black males drop out of school; black college students tend to major in subjects that result in worse job prospects (just 12 percent of black students get a bachelor’s degree in STEM, compared with 33 percent of Asian students and 18 percent of white students, for example); one third of the American prison population is black.

While it is possible for all of this to be attributed to systemic evils, any solution must come from individuals making responsible and good decisions. Cutting checks won’t fix this. But such a policy recommendation makes for excellent demagoguery – it allows those who promote foolish and failed ideas to revel in their own supposed altruism, all while helping no one.

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