Reparations for Slavery: Fair or Folly?

We are offline due to a much-needed research period this winter/spring, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces that you might have missed the first time.

With 'reparations for slavery' back in the news thanks to presidential hopefuls such as Kamala Harris, Francis 'Beto' O'Rourke, and Liz Warren, here is some data we were able to find on the subject back when Ta-Nehisi Coates last floated it. We hope you find it as interesting as we did.  

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[Re-post, original post here.]

'The Hayward family's nurse Louisa and her legal owner,' 1858

Having addressed Atlantic editor Ta-Nehisi Coates' wish for reparations for red-lining, we now turn to another of his claims: That descendents of U.S. slaves deserve cash payouts for their forebears' suffering.

There is the question of both a) the legitimacy and b) the practicality of such a scheme. We shall only discuss the former, because if it is truly worthwhile, the latter can always be worked out.

Poring through Coates' 17-page article, we have guessed that he objects to U.S. chattel slavery on the following grounds:  1) Its very existence was unconscionable, 2) It was unusually inhumane, 3) It destroyed the Afro family, and 4) It helped create the large black-white wealth gap we see today.

We shall address his points one by one.

The Progressive Project: Re-Colonizing Africa

We shall save you from yourselves

The film The Black Panther has been taking Hollywood by storm. Progressives in particular are excited:

The film is set in Wakanda, a fictional technologically advanced country in East Africa which was never colonized. For people of African descent, the kingdom of Wakanda finally brings a searing question—what if the colonists hadn’t arrived and Africa had been allowed to develop unencumbered by international influence?—to the big screen.

Africa unchained

Is it true? Would an un-colonized Africa have given the world an advanced, high-tech utopia?

We at TWCS are not so sure. 

Two generations after colonialism ended, alarmed that Africa seemed to be sinking rather than swimming, Tony Blair gathered a 17-person commission to examine the question:

One more commission for Africa

When former colonies across the globe began in the 1960s to prepare themselves for independence, nobody was that worried about Africa. The anxiety was all for Asia. 

That was barely four decades ago. Today Africa is the poorest region in the world. Half of the population live on less than one dollar a day. Life expectancy is actually falling. People live, on average, to the age of just 46. 

… Africa is the only continent in the world which is stagnating. Why has it fallen so far behind?

Optimism 

African poverty and stagnation is the greatest tragedy of our time. Poverty on such a scale demands a forceful response. … Africa requires a comprehensive ‘big push’ on many fronts at once.  

Investing for economic growth means rebuilding African health and education systems, many of which are now on the point of collapse.

From the World Food Conference in 1974, at which Henry Kissinger declared 'In ten years no child shall go to bed hungry,' to the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, which vowed to end world hunger by 2015, Westerners have long been wringing their hands over this continent.

A Wakandian renaissance?  On the contrary, it seems the further colonialism recedes into the past, the more desperate Africa's situation becomes. 

Fifty years after independence, then, Tony Blair, Bob Geldof et al. have in effect produced a 464-page manifesto calling for...

...the re-colonization of Africa. 

On what do we base this claim?

Weapons of Mass Migration: Are You a Target?

Reaction to Trump's threat to turn off the migrant tap

Donald Trump's proposed immigration policies--though moderate by the standards of any other era in U.S. history--are spurring an unprecedented wave of outrage.

The immense waves of migrants (legal and illegal) pouring into the U.S. and Europe are, say his opponents, a blessing, a gift, even the only way to survive.

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Is it true? 

Today there are a quarter of a billion people living outside their home countries--the most ever recorded in human history. But these mass movements aren't happening by chance-- far larger forces are at play.

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We live in an era where demographic weapons are in fact being lobbed around the globe, disturbing the fragile ecosystems of human societies, in some cases threatening to topple them. 

Who is in the line of fire? Can one make oneself less of a target? 

Africans flood into Europe;  Latin Americans flood into the U.S.

How? 

The Diversity Tax

Historic Carpetright Building in London, 1930: Built, 2011: Destroyed by Diversity

It is in our day an undisputed fact, almost a religious dogma, that 'diversity is our strength.' This credo is endlessly repeated by our leaders, including the heads of state of the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., and France.

Former University of Michigan President Lee Bollinger:

Diversity is not merely a desirable addition to a well-run education. It is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare. For our students to better understand the diverse country and world they inhabit, they must be immersed in a campus culture that allows them to study with, argue with and become friends with students who may be different from them.

By 'diversity,' of course, Mr Bollinger does not mean diversity of opinion (verboten on many campuses), but diversity of melanin content.  

Nearly every political, religious, academic, and cultural leader in every Western country today agrees that (racial) Diversity is, indeed, Our Strength. Or as the French say, 'La diversité est une richesse.'

Are they right?

We at TWCS propose, on the contrary, that in Western countries diversity has proven to be much more like a tax. A tax that falls, like medieval manorial dues, disproportionately on the working classes.

Fort Hood Massacre: Diversity über alles

A tax is not ipso facto a bad thing. Most of us happily pay income or sales tax knowing it helps fund our roadways, police, garbage pick-up, etc.

But how much is the Diversity Tax costing us per year?  And what, exactly, are we getting in return? Is it worth it?

In order to get a closer look, we invite you to join us on a trip through the modern Multicultural West.  It may be wise to bring your checkbook.

Why Re-Colonization? Future Orientation

Mongongo tree and fruit

Each day, the Kung San walked long distances to the mongongo groves to collect their fruits.  

Once he asked a tribesman why nobody had ever made an attempt to grow mongongo trees near some of the permanent water holes where the tribe resided.  "You could do that if you wanted to," he replied, "but by the time the trees bore fruit, you would be long dead." --Anthropologist Richard Lee

(part I of two)

At independence, 50 years ago, optimism for the tropics was high. No one could have dreamed that half a century later, a massive movement for re-colonization would be afoot--led not by Africa's leaders but by her masses.

1960: Demanding Europeans leave Africa; 2014: Africans demanding to be let into Europe

We have looked at some of the reasons that the global South wants into Teutonic countries.  But the real appeal is broader.  Globally, tropical peoples are trying to migrate to lands run by temperate peoples.

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Like a baby trying to crawl back into the womb, the formerly colonized are coming back to their old foreign masters and begging (or demanding) to be ruled by them again.

One year of African boat people = a city the size of Venice. Can Europe absorb them all?

Why?

We propose two major reasons: Future orientation and Commonweal orientation.  These two qualities, we argue, are plentiful in the North but in short supply in the South, where their opposites (Short-Sightedness and Clannishness) can be found in abundance.

Today we shall focus on the former: Future orientation. We argue that the shortage of this trait in warmer climes has prevented these societies from developing the way they wish to. This is why, two generations after independence, millions are voting with their feet to place themselves back under Euro rule.

We also argue these traits follow tropical peoples long-term, which is why North America's centuries-old African population has never assimilated. This too, we shall show, should be a cautionary tale for European deciders on immigration.

So what is the evidence to back up our assertions?

There's Something About Teutonics

Africans waiting to storm Spanish Melilla in Morocco, 'gateway to Europe'

Every year thousands board rickety boats, hide in the backs of trucks, planes, and container ships, cross miles of barren desert on foot... All to get themselves to a land where they can be ruled by a racial group far distant from their own.

Mexicans seeking Anglo rule: Illegal desert crossing at Sonora 

They cross the Mediterranean by the hundreds, many dying en route.  Not to get to Italy--that's only phase one--but to the real Eldorado: Northern Europe.

Over half a million Mediterranean boat people since the turn of the century

Calais, in the north of France, is now home to a tent encampment of several thousand third-world migrants. Are they content to have made it to one of the richest countries on the planet? They are not. Each day they lie in wait trying to jump in the backs of trucks embarking the Channel ferry for the promised land: the U.K.

The mayor of Calais has begged for help with an increasingly uncontrollable situation 

Boats of fortune leave regularly from Sri Lanka and Indonesia, full to cracking with Pakistanis, Lebanese, Somalis...  Though these Asian and African 'refugees' are surrounded by dozens of safe countries which could take them in, they'd rather risk death on the open sea in hopes of reaching a land run by...Anglos. Why?

Dozens of Iraqi and Iranian women and children perished in this December 2010 crash 
off the coast of Austrialia

Gallup recently polled the citizens of Planet Earth, asking 1) Would you like to migrate abroad? and 2) If so, where?

They have concluded that three-quarters of a billion people would, in fact, like to leave their home country.

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From this Gallup was able to cook up a Potential Net Migration Index: If everyone in the world could magically land in his country of choice tomorrow, Singapore's population would rise by 219%.  Zimbabwe's would fall by 47%.  The top 20 destinations, according to this measure:

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Thirteen of these twenty, one may have noticed, have a little something in common.

Reparations for Red-lining?

FHA map of Los Angeles, 1939 

'Ingenious and powerful,' 'important and compelling', 'stunningly ambitious;' it has 'broken traffic records and vanished from newsstands,' 'setting ablaze' social media.  What is it?

It is 'The Case for Reparations,' Atlantic's June 2014 cover story by editor Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The idea has been tossed around since Emancipation, falling out of fashion as of late. Coates brings it roaring back in this long-form piece, calling on Euro-Americans to 1) publicly express their guilt about past oppression, and 2) pay reparation money to their Afro countrymen.  Does his argument hold water?

The 17-page article covers much ground, but it seems Coates seeks redress for three major wrongs:

• Slavery
• Land theft
• Red-lining

They are three quite different topics, and should be treated as such.  We shall begin by addressing the most recent: so-called 'redlining.'

Coates tells the story of Clyde Ross, son of Mississipi sharecroppers who came to Chicago in the Great Migration:

'Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. 

Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime.'

Why was Ross obliged to buy a house 'on contract'? Because he could secure no regular mortgage financing. Chances are, in large part because he was Afro-American.

Foreign Policy and the Less Able

 

Lending to the under-developed: Damned if you do, damned if you don't?

We have asked if Sub-Saharan Africa can really be considered 'post-colonial,' and concluded that it cannot. When the More Able butt up against the Less Able, the power dynamic can be so uneven that normal relations are impossible.  Westerners (and, increasingly, Easterners) just can't seem to keep their fingers out of all those little pies, commercial or humanitarian.   But the doctrine of international relations today says that all peoples sit at the same table, negotiating as equals.

If it were proved tomorrow, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Sub-Saharans as a group were far less able than Westerners,... what would be the right policy response?  We at Those Who Can See argue that such a policy framework is not hard to imagine-- as it is largely the one being used now.

World Trade Organization:  Do we all belong at the Grown-ups' table?

1) Trade policy

We don't force children to play by the same rules as adults. In the context of the WTO, if a More Able people were faced with a profoundly Less Able one, what could be considered a 'fair' trade position to take? It may look something like this:

The first Lomé Convention (Lomé I), which came into force in April 1976, was designed to provide a new framework of cooperation between the then European Community (EC) and developing ACP [African, Caribbean, Pacific] countries, in particular former British, Dutch, Belgian and French colonies.

It had two main aspects. It provided for most ACP agricultural and mineral exports to enter the EC free of duty. Preferential access based on a quota system was agreed for products, such as sugar and beef, in competition with EC agriculture. Secondly, the EC committed ECU 3 billion for aid and investment in the ACP countries.

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Why are these countries singled out for special treatment?  After all, the list of places colonized by Europe is much longer:

Corruption: The exception or the rule?

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IMF chief Christine Lagarde raised hackles this week when she suggested one way Greeks could get themselves out of the pickle they're in would be to cut back on their national sport of tax-evasion.  She also suggested her tears of pity would be better spent on Nigerien children, forced to walk two hours to school and sit three to a chair, than on profligate Greeks.

 Africans and Greeks: Pity sweepstakes?

The Niger comparison was interesting, as it suffers from some of the same problems as Greece, but at astronomically higher levels. Among them is the one which gives the IMF fits, that stubborn, impossible-to-remove kudzu, the sinister C-word: Corruption.

It has become gospel among international policy-makers that corruption is a big problem, but a fixable one. Bad laws = corruption. Good laws = no corruption.  They thus traipse around the planet giving PowerPoint presentations on how to open your very own Anti-Corruption Ministry, sure that they're leaving little Swedens on the Sahara and Englands on the Euphrates in their wake.

With just a bit of HBD knowledge, a policy-maker might ask: What if corruption were not a product of laws, but of men?  What if corruption came from men's beliefs, their character traits, their deepest biological instincts? What if it is our natural state?  What if it can't be fixed? What then?

Besides the 'bad-laws' fallacy, a second error made by policy-makers is the 'bad-leaders' fallacy.  The poor honest folks in Country X suffer terribly because their leaders are so corrupt. And yet coup/election after coup/election, as if by magic, one bad leader after another comes to power.  Unless these people are being airlifted in from a foreign land, one can presume they are made of the same stuff as their countrymen.

In addition, what the throw-the-bums-out crowd fails to realize is that in corrupt countries, everyone (or almost) is on the take.  The same character traits that drive government ministers to  accept suitcases full of cash are also likely to be found in small shopkeepers who say, 'Do you want a receipt for that? Are you sure? (wink wink)', as well as the customer who responds, 'No no, of course not! (wink wink)'

Lagarde's admonishment to 'Pay your taxes!' is merely spitting into the wind.  In a country where the average taxpayer can buy off the average tax inspector with a sufficiently fat envelope, what precisely is she hoping for? Who watches the watchers?  This has led some Eurocrats to cry, 'Send in foreign tax inspectors!', which would be amusing were it not so disturbing.  Is a country whose government officials are under the control of a foreign power not by definition a colony?

We are thus led to ask: Corruption, that headache of international policy-makers--is it a behavior, or a state of being?

Building a Better Currency Union

Belly up to the trough 

Like so many policy domains, international economic policy in the West has fallen victim to the Late Twentieth Century Delusion: 'People are people.'

Foreign policy was once the playground of race realists at every level.  The only trace of this left may be the Pentagon, who in its double-secret PC-proofed dungeon whips up instructional pamphlets aimed at keeping GIs from getting killed by letting them know some people are, in fact, Not Like Us.  (Or used to anyway.)

Back when foreign conquest was the norm, the primitive peoples of the world were seen as docile labor to exploit (rightists) or as poor backward heathen to civilize (leftists).  But what no one disagreed on was that they were, in fact, primitive.  That is to say, Not Like Us.

De-colonization, the U.N., etc. at last clued us in to the fact that everybody on planet earth was, in fact, just like us.  International economic policy has thus taken on a rather surreal cast, as on the one hand the West insists that Africa is its equal, but on the other hand sets up trade agreements with her that make her appear, decades after de-colonization, to be a slightly retarded child.

One current example of the perils of 'People are people' is that of the European Monetary Union, or Eurozone.  Conceived in the chaos of the waning days of Bretton Woods, it aimed to be something entirely new--a monetary and economic union of several large sovereign states.  The hard work of Jacques Delors, among others, made it all happen.

(The British, then as now, were not enthusiasts.)


Ten years later, it all seems to be falling apart. (Don't be fooled by the lull in hysterics; disintegration continues apace.) Economists are openly warning that to survive, the Eurozone will have to split in two.  Yet the 2011 EU decision-makers seemed totally baffled by the meltdown. Why?

The reasons are many; we shan't look at all but only one: People aren't people.



The Eurozone, some have surmised, was at its heart an attempt by the French to neuter fearsome Germany once and for all.  The German cities and states had long been wealthy trade centers, but unification in 1871 gelled them into a power that brought Europe to its knees.  Germany was, in a word, scary.  Forcing her to entwine her fiscal fortunes forever with those of Mediterranean Europe... what better way to leash the giant?

So how did it happen?

As Bretton Woods broke down, several European states began to peg their currencies to each other:  The European Monetary System (EMS) was born.  The end goal was a single currency for all of Europe, with liberté, égalité, and fraternité for all.  But there was always a niggling problem.

During this time [1983-87], the Deutsche mark evolved as the anchor currency of the system, and the anti-inflationary policies of the Bundesbank became the reference point for partner countries....

There were perceptions that the system was "asymmetric" because of the dominant role of the Deutsche mark...

In the wake of the Wall Street crash of October 1987, ...international funds sought refuge in the Deutsche mark, and strong tensions developed within the ERM [European Exchange Rate Mechanism]... (1)

What to do when the dream of equality bumps up against the reality of superiority?

While Germany may have chained herself to this shaky ship to atone for her WWII sins, for the weaker southern economies it was basically a free-cash bonanza. (Much like EU accession).

Once they had joined the euro zone, Europe's southern countries gave up trying to sort out their finances, says [ex-Finance Minister] Papantoniou. With a steady flow of easy money coming from the northern European countries, the Greek public sector began borrowing as if there were no tomorrow. This was only possible because the country, in becoming part of the euro zone, was also effectively borrowing Germany's credibility and credit rating.

Then the 2008 world credit crunch hit and the tide went out, revealing who was not wearing a bathing suit.  Unpayable debts, hand-wringing, finger-pointing, late night negotiations, harried Brussels press conferences, riots, tear gas... Time to throw in the towel?

A German by Any Other Name...

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The Maastricht treaty, indeed the whole idea of the E.U., is based on the principle that 'People are people.' Also known as the Late Twentieth Century Delusion.  As we have seen, the Think-Tankers who cook up international policy are in utter thrall to it.  No reason, say they, why a semiconductor industry such as flourishes in Japan couldn't do the same in Angola.  No reason at all.  All that's missing are the right incentives, the right institutions, the right...

...Shhh. Don't say 'people.' Crimethink.

It has become obvious that the Eurozone will survive in present form only if the Germans keep paying the debts of the Greeks.  Talk of new 'institutions' and 'treaties and 'incentives' is silly.  The incentives and treaties and institutions have been in place for ten years; they have not yet been able to turn Greeks into Germans.  Nor will they.

Why not?  What makes a German a German, and a Greek a Greek?  Couldn't we switch out the populations of these two countries and just assume that Greek-Germany and German-Greece would continue to function as they always have?

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Though it has become terribly unfashionable, there is little as satisfying as reading old-time authors' stout observations of other peoples, untouched by today's feminized hive-mind and its cries to not hurt anyone's feelings.  It was once taken for granted that a German was not a Greek.  Would today's Eurozone decision-makers come back to this distant wisdom, they might yet come up with some policy worth the name.

So-- a 2012 currency zone containing both a Germany and a Greece will not function, and we need writers from before the Wars to give us a hint as to why:

More Able and Less Able

The More Able will dominate the Less Able, always and everywhere.

Right-thinking people in the West are indignant about Europe's past colonial plunders.  They are furious at the thought of Western companies swooping in to buy up state assets from highly-indebted African countries.  More sanguine are they, however, about this:

"Roll up, roll up, roll up. Elgin Marbles, Acropolis, Mykonos. Anyone? You don't have to be an ancient Greek historian to understand the significance of it. But maybe it helps.  [...]  Under pressure to raise €50bn as the quid pro quo for its massive €110bn (£98bn) bail-out, Greece is being forced to hawk its industrial and commercial backbone to the highest bidder."

Who's buying?

Colonialism, Today II

A small country, a relatively happy country, a country who's been producing wealth at more or less the same level for years... 

 [photo: Peter G., Souvlaki for the Soul]

...Who one day decides to abandon control over its own monetary policy.  To take that sovereign control, stuff it in an envelope, stick on a stamp, and mail it to a country far, far away.

A boxing club made up of only heavy-weights and middle-weights has the magnanimity to invite in a few feather-weights.  How kind.  How inclusive. How optimistic.


What could possibly go wrong.


This, apparently:

Colonialism, Today

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For those unable to take care of themselves, life will always be a a vale of tears.

Unless someone else steps in.

Peoples, like water, should be allowed to find their natural level.  An adult can guide the hand of a four-year-old to create the Mona Lisa.  It's lovely, but when you let go of his hand, he may go back to drawing simple forms.  It's no use getting distressed that he can't do what you did for him.  Pretending otherwise is a recipe for frustration. 


Let him draw what he is capable of drawing.  He may want to reproduce your Mona Lisa.  When he can't, he may cry and ask that you give him better crayons, or more paper, or a better table or chair.  Give him all these things if you'd like; nothing you can give him will allow him to do what you did.  Nothing but picking up his hand and drawing it for him again.


Much as it pains you, let him draw his simple forms. Perhaps one day he'll advance to a point where he, too, can draw a Mona Lisa.  But if he can't--not ever--you must accept it. You and he both must steel yourselves and be content with whatever he can produce.  This can be frustrating.

But it is the price of true freedom.

Comparing Peoples--References

      International policy-makers, particularly economic ones, often consider the Earth's inhabitants as peas in a pod.  All the same, interchangeable units, that one can plug into an equation any old how--the average Kurd, as well as the average Japanese, can be represented as variable "x."

This blog disagrees.

Policy equations reckoned in such a way tend to come out cock-eyed, yet no one ever seems to try fiddling with variable "x."  By our calculations, says Important Washington Think Tank, Anglo-style liberal democracy should be flourishing in Russia, and Ethiopians should be exporting luxury cars as fast as their factories can spit them out.


And twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred years after all the 'right conditions' have been put into place, when the people in question is still as authoritarian or as poverty-stricken as ever, Think Tank-ers refuse to change the one variable that counts more than any other.

Variable "x."

So let's take one of their very favorite tools, statistics, to find out why Think Tank-ers just might want to have another think coming.

Letting things slide

Greeks are furious over the crisis rocking their country.  Disbelief has given way to anger, one minister describing it as 'the darkest page in [our] history.'

No, not that crisis.  This one:

"Nearly 70 people have been named in Greece in connection with an alleged football match-fixing scandal.  They include two Super League club presidents, club owners, players, referees and a chief of police.  They are charged with a variety of offences including illegal gambling, fraud, extortion and money laundering.

The investigation began after European football's governing body Uefa published a list of 41 match results from 2009-10 which they believe to be suspicious. 

Among the 68 suspects named by judicial authorities on Friday were Vangelis Marinakis, Greece's top football league official and chairman of champion club Olympiakos Piraeus, and Avraam Papadopoulos, national team and Olympiakos defender.  Late on Friday, a court order banned all 68 from leaving the country."

But really, sports cheating scandals are hardly anything new.  And they happen all over the world. What's so special about this one?