Conservatives for Reparations, ribbit-ribbit
Michelle Malkin reports that Alan Keyes has come out in favor of reparations for slavery. My first reaction is that this is fantastic news. I was getting mighty tired of being the only conservative in America in favor of slavery reparations; to have my favorite politician/muppet be the one to join me at the ramparts is a nice bonus.
I'm not entirely sure about the details of Keyes' plan, which would exempt African-Americans from federal taxes for one or two generations. On the one hand, this seems to be just an extension of his always-there/always-unachievable plan to abolish the federal income tax entirely; I'm not sure how much this has to do with reparations per se, and how much this is just Keyes trying to get part of his program through in a Trojan Horse. It would be like Hillary Clinton coming out for reparations while announcing as her reparations plan nationalized free health care for African-Americans, or Dick Gephardt insisting that there be protective tariffs for African-American-owned heavy industry. Assuming this isn't just a shameless piece of political pandering, perhaps Keyes' secret plan here is to partially abolish the federal income tax, for African-Americans only, and then when Latinos complain that they deserve reparations too to abolish it for them, and for Native Americans and Asian-Americans when they complain, until the federal tax burden falls entirely on whites, at which point the whole thing will be so ridiculous that Congress will throw up its hands, abolish the federal tax system, and repeal the 16th Amendment for good measure. HaHa, brilliant!
OK, maybe not.
Another problem I have with the Keyes plan (Editor's Note: You should be aware right now that this post will be long, nit-picky and self-important. If you don't like those traits of mine, you may want to scroll down to the previous posts, where I've got delightful bon mots about how F-ing sick I am right now. Otherwise continue.) is that it's completely ass-backward if the goal is to actually help poor African-Americans. Especially if they're only going to be exempt from the federal income tax. Between exemptions, deductions and the Earned Income Tax Credit, poor people - and, according to the last Census, a quarter of African-Americans live in poverty - tend to pay little to nothing in federal income tax. Their tax burden mostly takes the form of the payroll tax, so unless Keyes' plan would exempt African-Americans from that too it would do virtually nothing to help those African-Americans reparations are ostensibly designed to help, the poor. The plan would, however, be an enormous boon to African-Americans like Keyes, Barak Obama, and their fellow Illinoisian Oprah Winfrey.
My third objection to the Keyes reparations plan is that, more than any other specific reparations proposal I've seen, it runs head-on into the "who's Black?/who isn't?" problem. It's one thing to propose a butt-load of new social and infrastructure spending, to be focused in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. Once you convinced people to support the basic idea, the hard part would be over. It would be relatively easy to come to a consensus as to which neighborhoods were and were not African-American neighborhoods, and even those that just missed the cut could still get a place at the government trough through ordinary pork-barrel politics. Keyes plan is more complicated, to say the least. African-Americans will be exempt from federal taxes. But who's an African-American? Is Tiger Woods? How about Barak Obama? If the Keyes plan is ever enacted (not that there's a serious threat of that) this won't be an academic question. Being "African-American" will mean the difference between a lifetime exemption from federal taxes and a lifetime of workin' for the man in Washington. That's thousands of dollars, at the bare minimum, over the course of a lifetime. Everyone and their sister is going to be claiming to be an African-American. They can't all get the tax exemption; someone's going to have to decide who is and who isn't African-American, probably someone at the IRS. They're going to use what, a color wheel? a genealogy chart? perhaps a pair of foreceps and a copy of "The Rise of the Colored Empires"?
Which brings me to my final two objections to the Keyes plan: it's a non-starter constitutionally, and it's socialist. It's unconstitutional: This is a country where it's unconstitutional for the government to require construction companies it employs to give preference in hiring to minority-owned subcontractors, where it's unconstitional for a public university to assign "points" to race in a mathematical calculation to determine undergraduate admissions, where it was almost unconstitutional for a public law school to consider race at all as part of holistic approach to admissions. We're expected to believe that a tax system where whether you paid taxes or not at all depends entirely on your race wouldn't be struck down by the Supreme Court? Not on your life. They'd invalidate it so fast your head would spin. It's socialist: the gist of Keyes' argument seems to be that African-Americans have had a shitty lot throughout American history, and have one still today, (no argument on either of those fronts from here) and that we therefore ought to do what's within our power to help them improve their situation. Again, no argument here, at least on the level of generalities. I'm a Christian; I believe there's an affirmative duty of those of means to help the poor and the downtrodden. But when you use this kind of argument to justify a massive, government-mandated wealth-transfer, well, that's called socialism, Ambassador Keyes. I'm of the belief that there's a free-market, natural-rights-based argument for reparations, but this ain't it.
I've tried several times now to blog here my proposed reparations scheme, but each one has been a failure. Perhaps sometime later I'll succeed and blog it in-depth. The basic scheme is to create accounts for each person held in slavery during the Civil War (we can use the Freedmen's Bureau registers to create the list). We then fill those accounts with the present-day cash value of 40 acres and a mule, compounded for interest since 1865, and divide the money equally among those people who can make verifiable claim of linear descent from the person to whom the account's been assigned. (Yes, a massive genealogy project.) This seems to me a good free-market approach to the reparations problem, one which preserves tort law norms (people who suffer injury have a right to be made whole by their tortfeasors) and property rights norms (parents have the right to pass on property that is rightfully theirs to their descendants). The idea is to correct for the wrong that was done in 1865 when the Freedmen didn't get what they were owed - their compensation for their travails - the 40 acres and a mule General Sherman promised. And for the subsequent wrong, that they were unable to pass on the property that was rightfully theirs (the 40 acres, and any profits they turned thereupon) to their heirs. We virtually go back in time and compensate the Freedmen, and allow them to virtually pass on their property to their descendants. It's not a perfect plan, but it strikes me as better than "lets not tax African-Americans for 40 years".
I'm not entirely sure about the details of Keyes' plan, which would exempt African-Americans from federal taxes for one or two generations. On the one hand, this seems to be just an extension of his always-there/always-unachievable plan to abolish the federal income tax entirely; I'm not sure how much this has to do with reparations per se, and how much this is just Keyes trying to get part of his program through in a Trojan Horse. It would be like Hillary Clinton coming out for reparations while announcing as her reparations plan nationalized free health care for African-Americans, or Dick Gephardt insisting that there be protective tariffs for African-American-owned heavy industry. Assuming this isn't just a shameless piece of political pandering, perhaps Keyes' secret plan here is to partially abolish the federal income tax, for African-Americans only, and then when Latinos complain that they deserve reparations too to abolish it for them, and for Native Americans and Asian-Americans when they complain, until the federal tax burden falls entirely on whites, at which point the whole thing will be so ridiculous that Congress will throw up its hands, abolish the federal tax system, and repeal the 16th Amendment for good measure. HaHa, brilliant!
OK, maybe not.
Another problem I have with the Keyes plan (Editor's Note: You should be aware right now that this post will be long, nit-picky and self-important. If you don't like those traits of mine, you may want to scroll down to the previous posts, where I've got delightful bon mots about how F-ing sick I am right now. Otherwise continue.) is that it's completely ass-backward if the goal is to actually help poor African-Americans. Especially if they're only going to be exempt from the federal income tax. Between exemptions, deductions and the Earned Income Tax Credit, poor people - and, according to the last Census, a quarter of African-Americans live in poverty - tend to pay little to nothing in federal income tax. Their tax burden mostly takes the form of the payroll tax, so unless Keyes' plan would exempt African-Americans from that too it would do virtually nothing to help those African-Americans reparations are ostensibly designed to help, the poor. The plan would, however, be an enormous boon to African-Americans like Keyes, Barak Obama, and their fellow Illinoisian Oprah Winfrey.
My third objection to the Keyes reparations plan is that, more than any other specific reparations proposal I've seen, it runs head-on into the "who's Black?/who isn't?" problem. It's one thing to propose a butt-load of new social and infrastructure spending, to be focused in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. Once you convinced people to support the basic idea, the hard part would be over. It would be relatively easy to come to a consensus as to which neighborhoods were and were not African-American neighborhoods, and even those that just missed the cut could still get a place at the government trough through ordinary pork-barrel politics. Keyes plan is more complicated, to say the least. African-Americans will be exempt from federal taxes. But who's an African-American? Is Tiger Woods? How about Barak Obama? If the Keyes plan is ever enacted (not that there's a serious threat of that) this won't be an academic question. Being "African-American" will mean the difference between a lifetime exemption from federal taxes and a lifetime of workin' for the man in Washington. That's thousands of dollars, at the bare minimum, over the course of a lifetime. Everyone and their sister is going to be claiming to be an African-American. They can't all get the tax exemption; someone's going to have to decide who is and who isn't African-American, probably someone at the IRS. They're going to use what, a color wheel? a genealogy chart? perhaps a pair of foreceps and a copy of "The Rise of the Colored Empires"?
Which brings me to my final two objections to the Keyes plan: it's a non-starter constitutionally, and it's socialist. It's unconstitutional: This is a country where it's unconstitutional for the government to require construction companies it employs to give preference in hiring to minority-owned subcontractors, where it's unconstitional for a public university to assign "points" to race in a mathematical calculation to determine undergraduate admissions, where it was almost unconstitutional for a public law school to consider race at all as part of holistic approach to admissions. We're expected to believe that a tax system where whether you paid taxes or not at all depends entirely on your race wouldn't be struck down by the Supreme Court? Not on your life. They'd invalidate it so fast your head would spin. It's socialist: the gist of Keyes' argument seems to be that African-Americans have had a shitty lot throughout American history, and have one still today, (no argument on either of those fronts from here) and that we therefore ought to do what's within our power to help them improve their situation. Again, no argument here, at least on the level of generalities. I'm a Christian; I believe there's an affirmative duty of those of means to help the poor and the downtrodden. But when you use this kind of argument to justify a massive, government-mandated wealth-transfer, well, that's called socialism, Ambassador Keyes. I'm of the belief that there's a free-market, natural-rights-based argument for reparations, but this ain't it.
I've tried several times now to blog here my proposed reparations scheme, but each one has been a failure. Perhaps sometime later I'll succeed and blog it in-depth. The basic scheme is to create accounts for each person held in slavery during the Civil War (we can use the Freedmen's Bureau registers to create the list). We then fill those accounts with the present-day cash value of 40 acres and a mule, compounded for interest since 1865, and divide the money equally among those people who can make verifiable claim of linear descent from the person to whom the account's been assigned. (Yes, a massive genealogy project.) This seems to me a good free-market approach to the reparations problem, one which preserves tort law norms (people who suffer injury have a right to be made whole by their tortfeasors) and property rights norms (parents have the right to pass on property that is rightfully theirs to their descendants). The idea is to correct for the wrong that was done in 1865 when the Freedmen didn't get what they were owed - their compensation for their travails - the 40 acres and a mule General Sherman promised. And for the subsequent wrong, that they were unable to pass on the property that was rightfully theirs (the 40 acres, and any profits they turned thereupon) to their heirs. We virtually go back in time and compensate the Freedmen, and allow them to virtually pass on their property to their descendants. It's not a perfect plan, but it strikes me as better than "lets not tax African-Americans for 40 years".
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