Post by stugatze on Jan 22, 2023 0:09:38 GMT
Nothing would ever change or improve in America, 
.. as minorities would STILL blame whitey for racism and their own f-ing failures, and blacks would still likely engage in crime and violence as they do today! 
.. as minorities would STILL blame whitey for racism and their own f-ing failures, and blacks would still likely engage in crime and violence as they do today! 
Why racial reparations solve nothing
By: Ben Shapiro
January 18, 2023
This week, the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee released a report calling on the city to pay every black resident $5 million and absolve all of their outstanding personal debt. 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 rationale serves as the same sort of catchall term as "equity," widely beloved by the political 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. Thus, every inequality between blacks and whites, for example, becomes an instance of societal failure, to be cured with social engineering.
This is bad ethics, and it is bad social science. 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.
Simply put, the preferred solution of San Francisco's reparations committee – simply cutting checks – has been a dramatic failure in the United States.
In 1965, speaking at Howard University, President Lyndon Baines Johnson explained that he wanted to pursue a program of widespread redistributionism in order to right the racial wrongs 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."
To that end, the federal government has spent in excess of $25 trillion on redistribution programs in the United States. The result has been exceedingly poor: While the income gap ratio between the poorest quintile of Americans and the wealthiest quintile of Americans post-transfer payments and taxes is just 4-to-1, the wealth gap between black and white Americans has skyrocketed from approximately $50,000 pre-1960 to well over $130,000 in 2016. Why? Because it turns out that public policy designed to alleviate inequality can also alleviate the consequences of bad decision-making.
