First, who owes
them? A just debt is owed only if it is chargeable in justice to the debtor.
But the American public as such and as a whole did not incur the debt of
reparations for slavery, neither then nor now.
Second, what of
the proletariat? What industrial capital expropriated from proletarian labor
time differs only in legal form from what landed capital accumulated from fixed
assets that happened to be human beings. The claim of their descendants to
reparations stands on approximately the same economic ground as that of the descendants of slaves.
Or, to add a
political statement to the foregoing philosophical and economic statements,
people who would like to remedy an injustice by perpetrating another injustice
cannot expect those who suffer from the latter to vote for them.
Of course these
statements are so far merely conclusory and have to be argued for.
