Reparations Are a Statist Cudgel for Bludgeoning Property Owners

Reparations Are a Statist Cudgel for Bludgeoning Property Owners By CLG Founder, Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. | 16 March 2023 | (Opinion) San Francisco's panel on reparations has issued a recommendation that qualified black residents in that city receive $5 million in reparations for the financial effects of slavery and/or racial discrimination. There was never slavery in the city of San Francisco, but the panel nevertheless suggested that city inhabitants must atone for racial discrimination. Such calls for reparations to black people are based on the notion of collective white guilt. But collective guilt is a false notion, and reparations based on it would violate the property rights of those whose ancestors gained nothing from slavery, even if such parties benefited from so-called discrimination... Just as class guilt is a fatally flawed concept, so too is race guilt. If one gained nothing from slaveholding or trading, one does not owe a debt to a nebulous class of slave descendants. The execution of reparations on the grounds of collective race guilt would amount to theft of property from the rightful holders of it.