Another Old Topic the New Left Is Digging Up

Malashock is posting at FB today about an old issue that America’s forward thinking atavistic socialists have just discovered shining like a new dime on the ash heap of history: Reparations for Slavery.

I wrote about this almost 15 years ago, in terms I have yet to see attempted by anyone else. I tried to calculate a per capita number owed. I did that. No one else to my knowledge has done that, tongue in cheek or otherwise. Here’s the article. Here’s an excerpt that introduces the process of calculation:

The first step is to acknowledge that any claim of reparations pursued through the courts now is on behalf of people who have not themselves been slaves. The specific pain and suffering illustrated by the photograph(s) above was committed by people who are now dead against victims who are now dead. All possibility of reparations as a moral expiation of guilt is moot because all parties to the immoral  acts involved have been deceased for about a century. For this reason, the question of what reparations might be owed to the descendants of slaves must be a purely financial one, computed in terms of opportunity cost; that is, what financial losses are still being experienced by African-Americans that they wouldn't be experiencing if slavery had never existed in this country.

It is easy to see that the only valid comparisons we can make in this regard are between contemporary African-Americans and contemporary sub-Saharan Africans. The latter are the control population -- that population which was NOT captured, chained, sold to slave traders, and carried to American states for resale to slave owners. It is equally easy to see that the only statistic which matters is the lifetime financial expectations of African-Americans versus those of sub-Saharan Africans.

Lifetime financial expectations can be estimated based on two variables: per capita income and years of life expectancy. A contemporary African-American must accept the premise that without slavery in the U.S., his lifetime financial expectations would be those of an average contemporary sub-Saharan African, which can be calculated according to the following formula: Number of years of life expectancy multiplied by average annual per capita income. 

Read the article. It’s useful to bear in mind the next time this subject comes up in your own political encounters.