Socialist here likely means Democratic Socialist or Social Democratic.
Reparations discussion
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
Socialist here likely means Democratic Socialist or Social Democratic.
It's really something. In 1870 the slave owners had less wealth but by 1880 they had a ton more. What could have caused this? A racist system designed to help rich whites and hurt poor blacks? The benefits of generational wealth and social societies and other markings of class?
No it must have been that the people who spent their entire lives drinking mint juleps on the veranda worked harder in those 10 years than the people who spent their entire lives doing backbreaking labor in the sun.
Not exactly. Taking someone’s property isn’t the same as providing opportunities, such as admission to schools, to certain people at the expense of others. One is taking and redistributing, one is preferential treatment. Totally different.
Which I am also vehemently against because it’s state sponsored racism. We’re getting into another realm here now. My position on affirmative action has always been that we should help people on a color blind basis (socioeconomic status). The current system will grant admission to a rich black kid with worse grades who went to a fancy private school over a poor Asian kid with better grades merely due to race. This is 100% true if you’re not in the US and think that’s too ludicrous to be correct.
If we ran these programs based on SES, then poor kids (innocent kids mind you) of all races will be helped based on the hardships THEY endured. Unfortunately, because of the past and other factors, minorities are generally more disadvantaged. But the good thing is that because they represent a disproportionate amount of those that are less fortunate, they will also disproportionately benefit from programs based on SES, so you get the benefit of helping them without having to use racial discrimination to do it and affording poor children of all races an equal opportunity to benefit from the program.
Like I said, we’re getting off topic now though.
Reparations isnt taking property, its returning it to its rightful owners.
The article addresses exactly what you’re talking about. It explicitly says we can rule out “generational wealth” and that it is likely due to to social connections and that indicates we must remove barriers such as to elite social and professional networking. I’ve repeatedly said I’m for equality of opportunity. The point of posting that article was to emphasize that some it’s not as simple as blaming generational wealth and that the way to make things better is to provide for equal opportunity, not redistributing wealth.
The trouble with the property confiscation argument is that once society admits it was improperly acquired as an intergenerational consequence of slavery and Jim Crow, then the people who benefited from all of that will be viewed as having ownership of something that isn't really theirs. At that point, there has to be a bit of equity in rebalancing who has access to said assets.
Tell me, practically, how you trace that. By DNA? By tracing actual wealth? Much of it was wiped out. So then you say well, the slave owners sons didn’t prosper on wealth actually derived from slavery, but they rebounded with social connections so anything they subsequently earned in other professions also isn’t rightfully their ancestors now? Who are you to say that the wealth and property of innocent people 150 years removed from slavery isn’t rightfully theirs?
it's really difficult to work out what happens after several generations of only a certain group of people getting, uh, opportunities
But isn’t the exercise of tracing that generations practically impossible? Think about multiple generations of marrying. Say a slave owners daughter married someone in the shipping business. Their kid married someone who made money in construction. Who married a wealthy banker. Etc. how would you actually trace the wealth and determine that x amount of this family’s wealth is derived from slavery? In practice it’s impossible.
Poor people dont have social connections because they dont have wealth to join country clubs or to take part in business ventures or to send generation after generation to Ole Miss. Slaves have even less social connections. Its worrying that you can see how wealth and social status are linked.
Making gross oversimplifications doesn’t make you look smart. No one is even arguing what you posted.
It's really simple to work this out. There are three options.
A) generations of slavery and oppression allowed those who practiced it to accumulate enormous wealth and property and a dip in the reconstruction era (whose gains were reversed almost immediately) doesnt fundamentally change this
B) slave owners and their descendants are just harder workers and predisposed to business and wealth and what not in a way that lazy slaves and their descendents are not
C) it's all just a big coincidence
Of course I can. I’m saying we need to remove those barriers now. I’m saying you can’t go about taking property from people today because their ancestors had “privilege” 150 years ago. I’ve never once argued that slaves and their ancestors had equal opportunities or wealth back in the 1800s, I just fundamentally cannot get behind some sort of tracing of privilege to take from innocent people now to try to (you can’t) make up for injustices suffered by people generations ago.
Didnt america make reparations to the native americans?
Im not sure how you are reaching the conclusion that america, as a nation, isnt responsible for the actions of its governments. Imagine if you have people who build you a house, and you then dont pay those people, using youre own argument all youd have to do is dick around in court for years and then have your grand kids claim "it wasnt me, it was my pa that done it." And your family would then benefit from a free house. Now imagine you raped, tortured and murdered those people that built your house, then made it next to impossible for their families to earn any kind of living for generations. Are you sure you want to use "socialism" as a defence against acting like a monster?
Yes.
How does that in any way answer the post I made? Explain how you trace the wealth attributed to slavery rather than other means? Or is the mere fact that one person’s great great grandfather owned slaves enough to take their property even if subsequent generations married into wealth gained from other means and industries?
If you want to use gross oversimplification there’s no point in discussing. It’s like me saying there are no more issues in the US because some ancestors of former slaves are now billionaires.
Stop being intellectually dishonest.
Who is taking away property? @ATXRedDevil
The property doesnt belong to them. Its stolen wealth. The Rosetta stone doesnt belong to the British museum. The stolen Van Gogh doesnt belong to the descendants of the nazis who plundered it.
Yes. 40-50 years ago. Was poorly implemented. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/us/reparations-slavery.amp.html
There are two discussions going on here, one is reparations generally, coming from the government. My position is that it’s a complicated issue. The other is trying to trace wealth and take from individuals and families descendant from slave owners. I’m vehemently against that. If my position on the latter makes me a “monster” then so be it - that’s where the reference to socialism came in. If my position that government reparations is complicated makes me a “monster” then I don’t know what to tell you.
The obvious solution is to fund reparations with taxes on the super wealthy and so on. And if the wealthy are descendants of slave owners, slap an extra tax on them.
See posts above about tracing the wealth you want to take. Not as simple as a single object but again with the oversimplification.
I don’t think that’s an obvious answer at all and slapping an extra tax on descendants of slave owners would likely be ruled unconstitutional. Why should a wealthy American descended from a 1900s immigrant be taxed for that? Purely because they’re rich?
It would be a challenge and there would be inconsistencies and controversies (and fraud), for sure. But it would also help a hell of a lot of people who through no fault of their own, were born into a system that was rigged against them simply due to their race.
See posts above about taxation to return stolen wealth. Not as simple as "well gosh it's hard let's just not bother" but again with the oversimplification.
You think progressive taxation is unconstitutional?
I think there's a strong argument in favour of these sorts of retrospective actions in principle. Where a group's relatively lack of prosperity in the modern day has come as a result of historical oppression there is clearly an injustice that has not been satisfactorily addressed. Clearly this is the case with slavery in the United States. If another's groups relative prosperity has come as a result of that same oppression it seems fair that the prosperous group play their part in addressing the injustice.
The issue with delivering something like this is that everyone will bicker about who foots the bill. If there are examples where you can reliably link the wealth of someone in the modern day to the wealth of their slave-owning descendent that's a great start, but those situations will be too few to raise a significant sum of money. Realistically, much of the wealth will have flowed around the system multiple times, been paid in taxed multiple times and been spent by the government multiple times. The money has become an intrinsic part of America's economy, just as the inequalities caused by slavery have become an intrinsic part of America's economy. Slave-holders' money has paid for infrastructure spending which benefits the rich more than the poor, paid for the wars which benefit the rich more than the poor and upheld the property laws which benefit the rich more than the poor. So when you're looking for people living now who have benefited from slavery, you need only look at whose who have benefited the most from America's economy over the last 100+ years. Basically, the rich.
It therefore seems quite cut and dry to me where the money would come from.
The issue with delivering something like this is that everyone will bicker about who foots the bill. If there are examples where you can reliably link the wealth of someone in the modern day to the wealth of their slave-owning descendent that's a great start, but those situations will be too few to raise a significant sum of money. Realistically, much of the wealth will have flowed around the system multiple times, been paid in taxed multiple times and been spent by the government multiple times. The money has become an intrinsic part of America's economy, just as the inequalities caused by slavery have become an intrinsic part of America's economy. Slave-holders' money has paid for infrastructure spending which benefits the rich more than the poor, paid for the wars which benefit the rich more than the poor and upheld the property laws which benefit the rich more than the poor. So when you're looking for people living now who have benefited from slavery, you need only look at whose who have benefited the most from America's economy over the last 100+ years. Basically, the rich.
It therefore seems quite cut and dry to me where the money would come from.
Beat me to it...
Are you trying to misrepresent my arguments? “Slapping an extra tax on descendants of slave owners would likely be ruled unconstitutional.” You think taxing people based on their lineage is progressive taxation? You either didn’t read my post properly or you’re deliberately misrepresenting what I’m saying. In any event, I’ll pass on replying to more of your posts.
Wouldn’t the better solution be to focus on continuing to make things equal rather than trying to hurt innocent people to make up for past innocent people being hurt? I’m not against helping underprivileged people at all, but unfair treatment to some in the past shouldn’t try to be rectified by hurting innocent people today in my view.
Trying to make things equal is generally implicit in the purpose of having reparations.
Making things equal is kinda what reparations is for.
The idea people are being 'punished' in any way is so over the top and ridiculous - having to pay or contribute small sums to people who were systematically abused and mistreated in a way which allowed for your higher social status now is fair, it isn't some awful punishment.
He likes to mischaracterize what I say. I said “practically impossible” not hard. Another poster agreed. Generations of marriage and mixing of family wealth would make it practically impossible to attribute a current citizens wealth to slavery and if reparations were to happen it would be front he government anyway. We got down this rabbit hole with posters wanting to take from individuals.
Equal opportunities. Equality of outcome is a fraught idea that always hinges on hurting others. You cannot implement equality of outcome without hurting other people. Equality of opportunity doesn’t.
Cool. I know. Again did you read my post? Because the only thing I called potentially unconstitutional was taxing people based on their lineage. My post said nothing about progressive taxation being unconstitutional.
african americans should have equal opportunity to ghouls inherence
Haha, I like some of what he puts out there, not a fan of some. Fully behind his views on equality of opportunity v equality of outcome, though.Jordan Peterson, is that you ?
Either they had equal opportunities from 1865 onward and they just squandered it
or they never had equal opportunities and they endured another almost 200 years of unfairness but we cant do anything about it because that would be unfairly punishing the innocent rich by taking their property