Split (1)

train · 211k rows

comment stringlengths 1 9.49k	context listlengths 0 835
> If I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝" ]
> Curious to hear the sound test!	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝", ">\n\nIf I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?" ]
> I think this is what my anxiety looks like	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝", ">\n\nIf I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?", ">\n\nCurious to hear the sound test!" ]
> I NEED SOUND	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝", ">\n\nIf I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?", ">\n\nCurious to hear the sound test!", ">\n\nI think this is what my anxiety looks like" ]
> That's amazing. I could see them making an etsy shop with a basic set to make the keycaps. All to say, I want that.	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝", ">\n\nIf I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?", ">\n\nCurious to hear the sound test!", ">\n\nI think this is what my anxiety looks like", ">\n\nI NEED SOUND" ]
> damn this is amazing! <3	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝", ">\n\nIf I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?", ">\n\nCurious to hear the sound test!", ">\n\nI think this is what my anxiety looks like", ">\n\nI NEED SOUND", ">\n\nThat's amazing. I could see them making an etsy shop with a basic set to make the keycaps. All to say, I want that." ]
> Yo what profile is that?	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝", ">\n\nIf I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?", ">\n\nCurious to hear the sound test!", ">\n\nI think this is what my anxiety looks like", ">\n\nI NEED SOUND", ">\n\nThat's amazing. I could see them making an etsy shop with a basic set to make the keycaps. All to say, I want that.", ">\n\ndamn this is amazing! <3" ]
> I can't stop staring lol	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝", ">\n\nIf I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?", ">\n\nCurious to hear the sound test!", ">\n\nI think this is what my anxiety looks like", ">\n\nI NEED SOUND", ">\n\nThat's amazing. I could see them making an etsy shop with a basic set to make the keycaps. All to say, I want that.", ">\n\ndamn this is amazing! <3", ">\n\nYo what profile is that?" ]
> looks like a matrix keyboard	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝", ">\n\nIf I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?", ">\n\nCurious to hear the sound test!", ">\n\nI think this is what my anxiety looks like", ">\n\nI NEED SOUND", ">\n\nThat's amazing. I could see them making an etsy shop with a basic set to make the keycaps. All to say, I want that.", ">\n\ndamn this is amazing! <3", ">\n\nYo what profile is that?", ">\n\nI can't stop staring lol" ]
> So cool! looks like a warm homemade counter-part of the Melgeek lego keyboard	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝", ">\n\nIf I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?", ">\n\nCurious to hear the sound test!", ">\n\nI think this is what my anxiety looks like", ">\n\nI NEED SOUND", ">\n\nThat's amazing. I could see them making an etsy shop with a basic set to make the keycaps. All to say, I want that.", ">\n\ndamn this is amazing! <3", ">\n\nYo what profile is that?", ">\n\nI can't stop staring lol", ">\n\nlooks like a matrix keyboard" ]
>	[ "Chaotic evil setup", ">\n\nAh yes, the Brandenburg Gate keyboard lol", ">\n\nThe PCB frame and bottom parts of the keycaps are 3D printed, the rest of the case is made from Lego bricks. It's an interesting design and the stickers are pretty cool too =)\nHas anyone else done something similar?", ">\n\nNot the same, but KBDcraft's Adam Kit and Melgeek Pixel keyboard are other Lego inspired keyboard builds.", ">\n\nI have the Adam kit, and i love it", ">\n\nVery cool.", ">\n\nInteresting layout! 😝", ">\n\nIf I understood correctly it's Colemak with some extra layers?", ">\n\nCurious to hear the sound test!", ">\n\nI think this is what my anxiety looks like", ">\n\nI NEED SOUND", ">\n\nThat's amazing. I could see them making an etsy shop with a basic set to make the keycaps. All to say, I want that.", ">\n\ndamn this is amazing! <3", ">\n\nYo what profile is that?", ">\n\nI can't stop staring lol", ">\n\nlooks like a matrix keyboard", ">\n\nSo cool! looks like a warm homemade counter-part of the Melgeek lego keyboard" ]
/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post. All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog. Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended. ^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards	[]
> What is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards" ]
> I'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor. I don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything? I think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most. I do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts. Δ	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?" ]
> Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆). ^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ" ]
> Flat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. For example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. For example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! By making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. In practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards" ]
> I would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone." ]
> I had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else)." ]
> Nowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?" ]
> I hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world" ]
> Interesting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves." ]
> I can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders" ]
> African Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be." ]
> I understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place" ]
> Some of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling." ]
> Is that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer" ]
> I don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members. Now that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have. It doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate. All that oil was used to build the USA. So are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance." ]
> What exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?" ]
> This is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees." ]
> Well it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born." ]
> I am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born. (I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?" ]
> Well if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category. A race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? The other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)" ]
> Well maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?" ]
> And how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. You keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born." ]
> I'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same. In other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help. Additionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor. Basically I'm saying that any formula for compensation: 1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime 2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty 3) should NOT factor in "payback" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?" ]
> If we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too? You want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2." ]
> Can you clarify, are you saying: 1) "You haven't specified how this should be done" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born. or: 2) "You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all. Also, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?" ]
> Also, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as "emotional distress" in other types of legal scenarios. Context gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit- Is there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? I've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?" ]
> To me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept." ]
> I think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually. "Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps" -- well, it depends on what you mean by "fill the gaps" and how much "need based support". If by "fill the gaps" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day." ]
> If by "fill the gaps" you mean lift every person out of poverty Not what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. Again - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it)." ]
> If you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address." ]
> If you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. Why do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything." ]
> It's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true." ]
> You still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies "spread poverty?" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere." ]
> Well considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?" ]
> I don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. As to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. Now you asserted that this policy would "spread poverty." Can you explain why you think that?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America." ]
> The people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. Now you asserted that this policy would "spread poverty." Can you explain why you think that? It depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. Plus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?" ]
> In other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than "reparations" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. How are so sure of this? I recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. I will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet. When he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920) Redlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that. To say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy. For those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people." ]
> In other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than "reparations" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. I should have added, "... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime." That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try. What I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program. Glad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said "Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!"...	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day." ]
> I think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed. Inequality between groups Inequality between individuals Reducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them. The reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality. The inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"..." ]
> Regarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement "1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in. Because under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not. Hence, I think the statement "No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in. The second reason -- "Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, "If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc. Δ	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced." ]
> Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆). ^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ" ]
> What if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited? How is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards" ]
> The people who took your property are dead.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?" ]
> Okay? That doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead." ]
> My dad would get it back.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?" ]
> And if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back." ]
> The second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. No property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?" ]
> Yeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. Obviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.” Describe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”" ]
> Yeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. Ethical questions involve the choices of individuals. If you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”? Before you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. Obviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. We have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. What would a reparation law accomplish? So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime. Your theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims? Human nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is." ]
> Ethical questions involve the choices of individuals. Are you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? What would a reparation law accomplish? Justice. Your theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims? No. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice? You seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen." ]
> you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? An ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. What would a reparation law accomplish? Justice. Giving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. There is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold. My girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation? Less fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money? My daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money? Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice? Does it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just." ]
> Whether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?" ]
> I agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of "justice" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation? That's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense." ]
> The big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others. In reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once. Though another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would. Practically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education. Many countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle. I also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now." ]
> Well if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on "reparations" or "inequality-reducing wealth transfer", it seems the obvious question is "how much in reparations" vs. "how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer". So assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor. So I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice." ]
> If any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?" ]
> I think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done. With that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function: Reparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. Since the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823. The major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because: The thing they did was not, at the time, a crime The people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens If the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense" ]
> Reparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. I'm not holding my breath.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time." ]
> But this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better. However you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath." ]
> No. I'm talking about drastic economic change. Damage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen. Targeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born." ]
> how does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group." ]
> "how does need based aid address financial disparities" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses? "how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications? My understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations" ]
> most need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no. Definitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself. your last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates." ]
> I know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂" ]
> why does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)" ]
> An easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables" ]
> I agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people." ]
> You can't rectify a past injustice with a future injustice. Reparations is just straight up racist bullshit. It's the same argument used to support policies treating races differently (affirmative action). I grew up on the value that your supposed to treat everyone equally regardless of what they look like. I will not accept a fucking penny from my neighbor just because their skin color is different from mine. That is morally repugnant.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.", ">\n\nI agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born." ]
> OK, although I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing, since I said I was arguing for an alternative to reparations.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.", ">\n\nI agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nYou can't rectify a past injustice with a future injustice. \nReparations is just straight up racist bullshit. It's the same argument used to support policies treating races differently (affirmative action). I grew up on the value that your supposed to treat everyone equally regardless of what they look like. I will not accept a fucking penny from my neighbor just because their skin color is different from mine. That is morally repugnant." ]
> I think you had a good methodology and approach and I agree with your findings that it would be better comparatively, however, I caution against establishing a welfare state. That is similar to what we have now. The"War on Poverty" was started by Johnson in 64', since then, trillions have been spent and we have seen negative repercussions, not positive benefits. The idea is there, the passion is solid and wanting to do good is admirable but if your experiment has negative unintended consequences and your goal is not reached after 60 years, maybe the approach is wrong. Dr Milton Freedman delves into this quite a bit. It has to do with human nature. It's like the animals in the wild, there is a reason your not supposed to feed them, they become dependant. If your advocating for a dependency government, that is an entirely separate conversation that would be interesting, otherwise providing too many handouts is extremely dangerous and demoralizing to generations. If you provide a commodity to a poor person were they lose that commodity if they achieve more, you have incentivized them to remain poor. Providing for themselves at a higher level reduces the products they receive and could place them in a relatively, by their perspective, worse situation. No parent wants to work harder so they can provide less for their child but that's exactly the effect some of these programs have. Now imagine growing up generation after generation on welfare, where ambition and striving to support yourself are not the most pursued values. Don't mistake what I'm saying for lazyness. There is a very serious and honest conversation that needs to take place about how politicians have fucked over generations of people, by incentivizing them to remain poor. It's disgusting, demoralizing and morally repugnant.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.", ">\n\nI agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nYou can't rectify a past injustice with a future injustice. \nReparations is just straight up racist bullshit. It's the same argument used to support policies treating races differently (affirmative action). I grew up on the value that your supposed to treat everyone equally regardless of what they look like. I will not accept a fucking penny from my neighbor just because their skin color is different from mine. That is morally repugnant.", ">\n\nOK, although I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing, since I said I was arguing for an alternative to reparations." ]
> Well that shows that poverty plus drips and drabs of government assistance do not make you better off. But kids who are born into wealthy families generally do better than kids who are born into poor ones. This suggests there is some amount of money that helps! In any case, providing public services that are always free (like free college and free health care) would seem to avoid some of the problems you're describing, since you don't have to deliberately remain poor in order to be eligible.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.", ">\n\nI agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nYou can't rectify a past injustice with a future injustice. \nReparations is just straight up racist bullshit. It's the same argument used to support policies treating races differently (affirmative action). I grew up on the value that your supposed to treat everyone equally regardless of what they look like. I will not accept a fucking penny from my neighbor just because their skin color is different from mine. That is morally repugnant.", ">\n\nOK, although I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing, since I said I was arguing for an alternative to reparations.", ">\n\nI think you had a good methodology and approach and I agree with your findings that it would be better comparatively, however, I caution against establishing a welfare state. That is similar to what we have now. The\"War on Poverty\" was started by Johnson in 64', since then, trillions have been spent and we have seen negative repercussions, not positive benefits. The idea is there, the passion is solid and wanting to do good is admirable but if your experiment has negative unintended consequences and your goal is not reached after 60 years, maybe the approach is wrong. \nDr Milton Freedman delves into this quite a bit. It has to do with human nature. It's like the animals in the wild, there is a reason your not supposed to feed them, they become dependant. If your advocating for a dependency government, that is an entirely separate conversation that would be interesting, otherwise providing too many handouts is extremely dangerous and demoralizing to generations. \nIf you provide a commodity to a poor person were they lose that commodity if they achieve more, you have incentivized them to remain poor. Providing for themselves at a higher level reduces the products they receive and could place them in a relatively, by their perspective, worse situation. No parent wants to work harder so they can provide less for their child but that's exactly the effect some of these programs have. Now imagine growing up generation after generation on welfare, where ambition and striving to support yourself are not the most pursued values. Don't mistake what I'm saying for lazyness. \nThere is a very serious and honest conversation that needs to take place about how politicians have fucked over generations of people, by incentivizing them to remain poor. It's disgusting, demoralizing and morally repugnant." ]
> Absolutely right. The issue I have with government subsidized education and healthcare comes down to the Quality-Cost-Universality triangle. As you making something more universal the quality goes down, cost goes up. This is because these are scarcities and providing something for free does not create more of that thing but it sure does increase demand for it which reduces the supply which leads to rationing. With healthcare, universal healthcare only works if you ban private healthcare. This has to do with profit motive and less physicians are willing to go $250K + rigorous medical school for sub optimal government wages compared to a private market. So banning private restricts competition because the government sets industry wages, not a free market system. This will invariably reduce the supply of physicians as well. As supply is reduced or at the least, steady, demand skyrockets from universality. This increases wait times and decreases availability. With less return on investment costs, there is less incentive to build more hospitals which has follow-on effects years later which also reduces medical emergency services coverage. There is also a generalized fear that standards in medical schools will drop to help meet the demand. The amount of time a person gets with their physician will also decrease as that physicians patient count increases. All this doesn't account for the issue of the government setting wage limits on physicians/medical staff as opposed to the free market system. This is essentially a government telling you what your labor is worth and you can take it or do something else. It's a form of coerced slavery that I find morally repugnant. Relatively the same issues can be had through subsidized schools.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.", ">\n\nI agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nYou can't rectify a past injustice with a future injustice. \nReparations is just straight up racist bullshit. It's the same argument used to support policies treating races differently (affirmative action). I grew up on the value that your supposed to treat everyone equally regardless of what they look like. I will not accept a fucking penny from my neighbor just because their skin color is different from mine. That is morally repugnant.", ">\n\nOK, although I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing, since I said I was arguing for an alternative to reparations.", ">\n\nI think you had a good methodology and approach and I agree with your findings that it would be better comparatively, however, I caution against establishing a welfare state. That is similar to what we have now. The\"War on Poverty\" was started by Johnson in 64', since then, trillions have been spent and we have seen negative repercussions, not positive benefits. The idea is there, the passion is solid and wanting to do good is admirable but if your experiment has negative unintended consequences and your goal is not reached after 60 years, maybe the approach is wrong. \nDr Milton Freedman delves into this quite a bit. It has to do with human nature. It's like the animals in the wild, there is a reason your not supposed to feed them, they become dependant. If your advocating for a dependency government, that is an entirely separate conversation that would be interesting, otherwise providing too many handouts is extremely dangerous and demoralizing to generations. \nIf you provide a commodity to a poor person were they lose that commodity if they achieve more, you have incentivized them to remain poor. Providing for themselves at a higher level reduces the products they receive and could place them in a relatively, by their perspective, worse situation. No parent wants to work harder so they can provide less for their child but that's exactly the effect some of these programs have. Now imagine growing up generation after generation on welfare, where ambition and striving to support yourself are not the most pursued values. Don't mistake what I'm saying for lazyness. \nThere is a very serious and honest conversation that needs to take place about how politicians have fucked over generations of people, by incentivizing them to remain poor. It's disgusting, demoralizing and morally repugnant.", ">\n\nWell that shows that poverty plus drips and drabs of government assistance do not make you better off.\nBut kids who are born into wealthy families generally do better than kids who are born into poor ones. This suggests there is some amount of money that helps!\nIn any case, providing public services that are always free (like free college and free health care) would seem to avoid some of the problems you're describing, since you don't have to deliberately remain poor in order to be eligible." ]
> This hypotetical case: my father lived in a house that the family had owned for generations. The king came and stole the house and evicted the father, because the king wanted to have a house for visiting. The king and my father is dead. Both me and the Kings son live in our own appartments, is able to support ourselves and is living a good life with no need of support. But both of us would like us to live in the house. The lawyers should now decide if i or the Kings son is the rightful owner of the house. Who should own the house?	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.", ">\n\nI agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nYou can't rectify a past injustice with a future injustice. \nReparations is just straight up racist bullshit. It's the same argument used to support policies treating races differently (affirmative action). I grew up on the value that your supposed to treat everyone equally regardless of what they look like. I will not accept a fucking penny from my neighbor just because their skin color is different from mine. That is morally repugnant.", ">\n\nOK, although I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing, since I said I was arguing for an alternative to reparations.", ">\n\nI think you had a good methodology and approach and I agree with your findings that it would be better comparatively, however, I caution against establishing a welfare state. That is similar to what we have now. The\"War on Poverty\" was started by Johnson in 64', since then, trillions have been spent and we have seen negative repercussions, not positive benefits. The idea is there, the passion is solid and wanting to do good is admirable but if your experiment has negative unintended consequences and your goal is not reached after 60 years, maybe the approach is wrong. \nDr Milton Freedman delves into this quite a bit. It has to do with human nature. It's like the animals in the wild, there is a reason your not supposed to feed them, they become dependant. If your advocating for a dependency government, that is an entirely separate conversation that would be interesting, otherwise providing too many handouts is extremely dangerous and demoralizing to generations. \nIf you provide a commodity to a poor person were they lose that commodity if they achieve more, you have incentivized them to remain poor. Providing for themselves at a higher level reduces the products they receive and could place them in a relatively, by their perspective, worse situation. No parent wants to work harder so they can provide less for their child but that's exactly the effect some of these programs have. Now imagine growing up generation after generation on welfare, where ambition and striving to support yourself are not the most pursued values. Don't mistake what I'm saying for lazyness. \nThere is a very serious and honest conversation that needs to take place about how politicians have fucked over generations of people, by incentivizing them to remain poor. It's disgusting, demoralizing and morally repugnant.", ">\n\nWell that shows that poverty plus drips and drabs of government assistance do not make you better off.\nBut kids who are born into wealthy families generally do better than kids who are born into poor ones. This suggests there is some amount of money that helps!\nIn any case, providing public services that are always free (like free college and free health care) would seem to avoid some of the problems you're describing, since you don't have to deliberately remain poor in order to be eligible.", ">\n\nAbsolutely right. The issue I have with government subsidized education and healthcare comes down to the Quality-Cost-Universality triangle. As you making something more universal the quality goes down, cost goes up. This is because these are scarcities and providing something for free does not create more of that thing but it sure does increase demand for it which reduces the supply which leads to rationing. \nWith healthcare, universal healthcare only works if you ban private healthcare. This has to do with profit motive and less physicians are willing to go $250K + rigorous medical school for sub optimal government wages compared to a private market. So banning private restricts competition because the government sets industry wages, not a free market system. This will invariably reduce the supply of physicians as well. As supply is reduced or at the least, steady, demand skyrockets from universality. This increases wait times and decreases availability. With less return on investment costs, there is less incentive to build more hospitals which has follow-on effects years later which also reduces medical emergency services coverage. There is also a generalized fear that standards in medical schools will drop to help meet the demand. The amount of time a person gets with their physician will also decrease as that physicians patient count increases. All this doesn't account for the issue of the government setting wage limits on physicians/medical staff as opposed to the free market system. This is essentially a government telling you what your labor is worth and you can take it or do something else. It's a form of coerced slavery that I find morally repugnant. \nRelatively the same issues can be had through subsidized schools." ]
> Reparations aren’t about the individual. They’re about collective responsibility. It’s about the government—which was directly responsible for some awful act in the past—making restitution for that crime. The government needs to make reparations for the crimes it enacted even if there isn’t a way to figure out who the recipients ought to be because too many records were destroyed or too much time has passed. The manner by which that reparation gets paid might be hard to figure out, but the need to pay it is morally pretty straightforward. People just don’t like the idea of paying the bill.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.", ">\n\nI agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nYou can't rectify a past injustice with a future injustice. \nReparations is just straight up racist bullshit. It's the same argument used to support policies treating races differently (affirmative action). I grew up on the value that your supposed to treat everyone equally regardless of what they look like. I will not accept a fucking penny from my neighbor just because their skin color is different from mine. That is morally repugnant.", ">\n\nOK, although I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing, since I said I was arguing for an alternative to reparations.", ">\n\nI think you had a good methodology and approach and I agree with your findings that it would be better comparatively, however, I caution against establishing a welfare state. That is similar to what we have now. The\"War on Poverty\" was started by Johnson in 64', since then, trillions have been spent and we have seen negative repercussions, not positive benefits. The idea is there, the passion is solid and wanting to do good is admirable but if your experiment has negative unintended consequences and your goal is not reached after 60 years, maybe the approach is wrong. \nDr Milton Freedman delves into this quite a bit. It has to do with human nature. It's like the animals in the wild, there is a reason your not supposed to feed them, they become dependant. If your advocating for a dependency government, that is an entirely separate conversation that would be interesting, otherwise providing too many handouts is extremely dangerous and demoralizing to generations. \nIf you provide a commodity to a poor person were they lose that commodity if they achieve more, you have incentivized them to remain poor. Providing for themselves at a higher level reduces the products they receive and could place them in a relatively, by their perspective, worse situation. No parent wants to work harder so they can provide less for their child but that's exactly the effect some of these programs have. Now imagine growing up generation after generation on welfare, where ambition and striving to support yourself are not the most pursued values. Don't mistake what I'm saying for lazyness. \nThere is a very serious and honest conversation that needs to take place about how politicians have fucked over generations of people, by incentivizing them to remain poor. It's disgusting, demoralizing and morally repugnant.", ">\n\nWell that shows that poverty plus drips and drabs of government assistance do not make you better off.\nBut kids who are born into wealthy families generally do better than kids who are born into poor ones. This suggests there is some amount of money that helps!\nIn any case, providing public services that are always free (like free college and free health care) would seem to avoid some of the problems you're describing, since you don't have to deliberately remain poor in order to be eligible.", ">\n\nAbsolutely right. The issue I have with government subsidized education and healthcare comes down to the Quality-Cost-Universality triangle. As you making something more universal the quality goes down, cost goes up. This is because these are scarcities and providing something for free does not create more of that thing but it sure does increase demand for it which reduces the supply which leads to rationing. \nWith healthcare, universal healthcare only works if you ban private healthcare. This has to do with profit motive and less physicians are willing to go $250K + rigorous medical school for sub optimal government wages compared to a private market. So banning private restricts competition because the government sets industry wages, not a free market system. This will invariably reduce the supply of physicians as well. As supply is reduced or at the least, steady, demand skyrockets from universality. This increases wait times and decreases availability. With less return on investment costs, there is less incentive to build more hospitals which has follow-on effects years later which also reduces medical emergency services coverage. There is also a generalized fear that standards in medical schools will drop to help meet the demand. The amount of time a person gets with their physician will also decrease as that physicians patient count increases. All this doesn't account for the issue of the government setting wage limits on physicians/medical staff as opposed to the free market system. This is essentially a government telling you what your labor is worth and you can take it or do something else. It's a form of coerced slavery that I find morally repugnant. \nRelatively the same issues can be had through subsidized schools.", ">\n\nThis hypotetical case: my father lived in a house that the family had owned for generations. The king came and stole the house and evicted the father, because the king wanted to have a house for visiting. The king and my father is dead. Both me and the Kings son live in our own appartments, is able to support ourselves and is living a good life with no need of support. But both of us would like us to live in the house. The lawyers should now decide if i or the Kings son is the rightful owner of the house. Who should own the house?" ]
> You argue that need-based beats reparations. I argue that while need-based clearly has merit, reparations cannot be replaced by need-based because all black people were set back in many ways and thus deserve a boost forward EVEN IF THEY ARE NOT POOR. You define reparations as payments for the mistreatment of your ancestors not of yourself. The problem is, the mistreatment of black ancestors has set black people back today. Maybe Jack would be rich if Jack's dad with top law school grades was able to be hired by the top law firm. Or if Jack's dad was able to get into law school. Because he was not, Jack doesn't get the head start an upper middle class rich-ish kid would get. And because of that, Jack goes to worse grade schools and doesnt see black people in white collar jobs (esp his dad) so doesnt identify with that lifestyle, doesnt pursue it as readily, and suddenly his potential has shrunk greatly. In short, black people have been moved 50 meters behind the starting line generations ago. Then, eventually, the laws and attitudes changed to today, where subtle racism (and rare overt racism) still exists in the US but generally speaking no one is being denied jobs, housing, service, etc for being black. The key is this: when we removed the laws that put them 50 meters back, we left them wherever they were. We did not move them forward whatsoever, nevermind forward 50 meters to where they would be without the racist restrictions on them. Jack's son, present day, can be whatever he wants. But he too does not have all the advantages that he wouldve had, had Jack's dad not been held back generations ago. It seems entirely reasonable to me that Jack's son receive some form of reparations to, for example, get him into a better grade school. A school which he theoretically would have been attending anyway, had his grandpa had the opportunity he should have had. Or maybe it's about going from a good school to a great school! Some black people are not poor, but all suffered being moved back, and thus all deserve to be moved forward to compensate for this. Note, that doesnt mean re-litigating anything. What it means it trying to give them a boost to balance the setbacks the gov caused them. The lucky ones who have really thrived since then should not be disentitled from compensation for these imposed setbacks just because they managed to have some success. It is fair to assume that without the setbacks, the lucky ones would be even further along, so in making things right the gov has a duty to help them get back where they would be. This all comes from the principle of paying for the wrongs you caused. Lucky ones were still wronged (by basically having generations of forced poverty, lack of education, etc until recently) and thus still must be compensated EVEN THOUGH they recovered well from the wrong. If you are shot, narrowly avoid dying, and go on to become a super fit triathlete, you still get compensated for bodily harm caused to you in spite of the fact that you recovered from that wrong well. Here, you might say the wrong was passed down to you instead of hitting you directly, but it still poisoned your family, your community, and these impacts still unmistakably affect your life in huge ways. That deserves compensation. Final note -- it isnt even about some utilitarian "we have to help the disadvantaged black people bc theyre so poor etc" philosophy. As I've said, they may not be poor. It is simply about making up for putting black people 50 meters back.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.", ">\n\nI agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nYou can't rectify a past injustice with a future injustice. \nReparations is just straight up racist bullshit. It's the same argument used to support policies treating races differently (affirmative action). I grew up on the value that your supposed to treat everyone equally regardless of what they look like. I will not accept a fucking penny from my neighbor just because their skin color is different from mine. That is morally repugnant.", ">\n\nOK, although I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing, since I said I was arguing for an alternative to reparations.", ">\n\nI think you had a good methodology and approach and I agree with your findings that it would be better comparatively, however, I caution against establishing a welfare state. That is similar to what we have now. The\"War on Poverty\" was started by Johnson in 64', since then, trillions have been spent and we have seen negative repercussions, not positive benefits. The idea is there, the passion is solid and wanting to do good is admirable but if your experiment has negative unintended consequences and your goal is not reached after 60 years, maybe the approach is wrong. \nDr Milton Freedman delves into this quite a bit. It has to do with human nature. It's like the animals in the wild, there is a reason your not supposed to feed them, they become dependant. If your advocating for a dependency government, that is an entirely separate conversation that would be interesting, otherwise providing too many handouts is extremely dangerous and demoralizing to generations. \nIf you provide a commodity to a poor person were they lose that commodity if they achieve more, you have incentivized them to remain poor. Providing for themselves at a higher level reduces the products they receive and could place them in a relatively, by their perspective, worse situation. No parent wants to work harder so they can provide less for their child but that's exactly the effect some of these programs have. Now imagine growing up generation after generation on welfare, where ambition and striving to support yourself are not the most pursued values. Don't mistake what I'm saying for lazyness. \nThere is a very serious and honest conversation that needs to take place about how politicians have fucked over generations of people, by incentivizing them to remain poor. It's disgusting, demoralizing and morally repugnant.", ">\n\nWell that shows that poverty plus drips and drabs of government assistance do not make you better off.\nBut kids who are born into wealthy families generally do better than kids who are born into poor ones. This suggests there is some amount of money that helps!\nIn any case, providing public services that are always free (like free college and free health care) would seem to avoid some of the problems you're describing, since you don't have to deliberately remain poor in order to be eligible.", ">\n\nAbsolutely right. The issue I have with government subsidized education and healthcare comes down to the Quality-Cost-Universality triangle. As you making something more universal the quality goes down, cost goes up. This is because these are scarcities and providing something for free does not create more of that thing but it sure does increase demand for it which reduces the supply which leads to rationing. \nWith healthcare, universal healthcare only works if you ban private healthcare. This has to do with profit motive and less physicians are willing to go $250K + rigorous medical school for sub optimal government wages compared to a private market. So banning private restricts competition because the government sets industry wages, not a free market system. This will invariably reduce the supply of physicians as well. As supply is reduced or at the least, steady, demand skyrockets from universality. This increases wait times and decreases availability. With less return on investment costs, there is less incentive to build more hospitals which has follow-on effects years later which also reduces medical emergency services coverage. There is also a generalized fear that standards in medical schools will drop to help meet the demand. The amount of time a person gets with their physician will also decrease as that physicians patient count increases. All this doesn't account for the issue of the government setting wage limits on physicians/medical staff as opposed to the free market system. This is essentially a government telling you what your labor is worth and you can take it or do something else. It's a form of coerced slavery that I find morally repugnant. \nRelatively the same issues can be had through subsidized schools.", ">\n\nThis hypotetical case: my father lived in a house that the family had owned for generations. The king came and stole the house and evicted the father, because the king wanted to have a house for visiting. The king and my father is dead. Both me and the Kings son live in our own appartments, is able to support ourselves and is living a good life with no need of support. But both of us would like us to live in the house. The lawyers should now decide if i or the Kings son is the rightful owner of the house. Who should own the house?", ">\n\nReparations aren’t about the individual. They’re about collective responsibility. \nIt’s about the government—which was directly responsible for some awful act in the past—making restitution for that crime. \nThe government needs to make reparations for the crimes it enacted even if there isn’t a way to figure out who the recipients ought to be because too many records were destroyed or too much time has passed. The manner by which that reparation gets paid might be hard to figure out, but the need to pay it is morally pretty straightforward.\nPeople just don’t like the idea of paying the bill." ]
> I think that "need-based" was the wrong word because it implies helping only the poor. I probably should have said "wealth transfers based on current wealth levels". (Where I'm using "wealth" loosely to include current income and projected earnings, etc.) In other words, if two groups of people are working equally hard, but due to the disadvantaged circumstances that the first group grew up in, the people in the first group make $70K a year and the people in the second group make $130K a year, "wealth transfers" could include transfers from the second group to the first group, even though the first group is not "poor". I'm just saying "the first group" should be defined by the disadvantaged circumstances that they personally faced. People of any race should be eligible and it should not include payback for things that happened before they were born.	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.", ">\n\nI agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nYou can't rectify a past injustice with a future injustice. \nReparations is just straight up racist bullshit. It's the same argument used to support policies treating races differently (affirmative action). I grew up on the value that your supposed to treat everyone equally regardless of what they look like. I will not accept a fucking penny from my neighbor just because their skin color is different from mine. That is morally repugnant.", ">\n\nOK, although I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing, since I said I was arguing for an alternative to reparations.", ">\n\nI think you had a good methodology and approach and I agree with your findings that it would be better comparatively, however, I caution against establishing a welfare state. That is similar to what we have now. The\"War on Poverty\" was started by Johnson in 64', since then, trillions have been spent and we have seen negative repercussions, not positive benefits. The idea is there, the passion is solid and wanting to do good is admirable but if your experiment has negative unintended consequences and your goal is not reached after 60 years, maybe the approach is wrong. \nDr Milton Freedman delves into this quite a bit. It has to do with human nature. It's like the animals in the wild, there is a reason your not supposed to feed them, they become dependant. If your advocating for a dependency government, that is an entirely separate conversation that would be interesting, otherwise providing too many handouts is extremely dangerous and demoralizing to generations. \nIf you provide a commodity to a poor person were they lose that commodity if they achieve more, you have incentivized them to remain poor. Providing for themselves at a higher level reduces the products they receive and could place them in a relatively, by their perspective, worse situation. No parent wants to work harder so they can provide less for their child but that's exactly the effect some of these programs have. Now imagine growing up generation after generation on welfare, where ambition and striving to support yourself are not the most pursued values. Don't mistake what I'm saying for lazyness. \nThere is a very serious and honest conversation that needs to take place about how politicians have fucked over generations of people, by incentivizing them to remain poor. It's disgusting, demoralizing and morally repugnant.", ">\n\nWell that shows that poverty plus drips and drabs of government assistance do not make you better off.\nBut kids who are born into wealthy families generally do better than kids who are born into poor ones. This suggests there is some amount of money that helps!\nIn any case, providing public services that are always free (like free college and free health care) would seem to avoid some of the problems you're describing, since you don't have to deliberately remain poor in order to be eligible.", ">\n\nAbsolutely right. The issue I have with government subsidized education and healthcare comes down to the Quality-Cost-Universality triangle. As you making something more universal the quality goes down, cost goes up. This is because these are scarcities and providing something for free does not create more of that thing but it sure does increase demand for it which reduces the supply which leads to rationing. \nWith healthcare, universal healthcare only works if you ban private healthcare. This has to do with profit motive and less physicians are willing to go $250K + rigorous medical school for sub optimal government wages compared to a private market. So banning private restricts competition because the government sets industry wages, not a free market system. This will invariably reduce the supply of physicians as well. As supply is reduced or at the least, steady, demand skyrockets from universality. This increases wait times and decreases availability. With less return on investment costs, there is less incentive to build more hospitals which has follow-on effects years later which also reduces medical emergency services coverage. There is also a generalized fear that standards in medical schools will drop to help meet the demand. The amount of time a person gets with their physician will also decrease as that physicians patient count increases. All this doesn't account for the issue of the government setting wage limits on physicians/medical staff as opposed to the free market system. This is essentially a government telling you what your labor is worth and you can take it or do something else. It's a form of coerced slavery that I find morally repugnant. \nRelatively the same issues can be had through subsidized schools.", ">\n\nThis hypotetical case: my father lived in a house that the family had owned for generations. The king came and stole the house and evicted the father, because the king wanted to have a house for visiting. The king and my father is dead. Both me and the Kings son live in our own appartments, is able to support ourselves and is living a good life with no need of support. But both of us would like us to live in the house. The lawyers should now decide if i or the Kings son is the rightful owner of the house. Who should own the house?", ">\n\nReparations aren’t about the individual. They’re about collective responsibility. \nIt’s about the government—which was directly responsible for some awful act in the past—making restitution for that crime. \nThe government needs to make reparations for the crimes it enacted even if there isn’t a way to figure out who the recipients ought to be because too many records were destroyed or too much time has passed. The manner by which that reparation gets paid might be hard to figure out, but the need to pay it is morally pretty straightforward.\nPeople just don’t like the idea of paying the bill.", ">\n\nYou argue that need-based beats reparations. I argue that while need-based clearly has merit, reparations cannot be replaced by need-based because all black people were set back in many ways and thus deserve a boost forward EVEN IF THEY ARE NOT POOR. \nYou define reparations as payments for the mistreatment of your ancestors not of yourself. The problem is, the mistreatment of black ancestors has set black people back today. Maybe Jack would be rich if Jack's dad with top law school grades was able to be hired by the top law firm. Or if Jack's dad was able to get into law school. Because he was not, Jack doesn't get the head start an upper middle class rich-ish kid would get. And because of that, Jack goes to worse grade schools and doesnt see black people in white collar jobs (esp his dad) so doesnt identify with that lifestyle, doesnt pursue it as readily, and suddenly his potential has shrunk greatly.\nIn short, black people have been moved 50 meters behind the starting line generations ago. Then, eventually, the laws and attitudes changed to today, where subtle racism (and rare overt racism) still exists in the US but generally speaking no one is being denied jobs, housing, service, etc for being black. The key is this: when we removed the laws that put them 50 meters back, we left them wherever they were. We did not move them forward whatsoever, nevermind forward 50 meters to where they would be without the racist restrictions on them. \nJack's son, present day, can be whatever he wants. But he too does not have all the advantages that he wouldve had, had Jack's dad not been held back generations ago. It seems entirely reasonable to me that Jack's son receive some form of reparations to, for example, get him into a better grade school. A school which he theoretically would have been attending anyway, had his grandpa had the opportunity he should have had. Or maybe it's about going from a good school to a great school! Some black people are not poor, but all suffered being moved back, and thus all deserve to be moved forward to compensate for this. \nNote, that doesnt mean re-litigating anything. What it means it trying to give them a boost to balance the setbacks the gov caused them. The lucky ones who have really thrived since then should not be disentitled from compensation for these imposed setbacks just because they managed to have some success. It is fair to assume that without the setbacks, the lucky ones would be even further along, so in making things right the gov has a duty to help them get back where they would be. \nThis all comes from the principle of paying for the wrongs you caused. Lucky ones were still wronged (by basically having generations of forced poverty, lack of education, etc until recently) and thus still must be compensated EVEN THOUGH they recovered well from the wrong. If you are shot, narrowly avoid dying, and go on to become a super fit triathlete, you still get compensated for bodily harm caused to you in spite of the fact that you recovered from that wrong well. Here, you might say the wrong was passed down to you instead of hitting you directly, but it still poisoned your family, your community, and these impacts still unmistakably affect your life in huge ways. That deserves compensation. \nFinal note -- it isnt even about some utilitarian \"we have to help the disadvantaged black people bc theyre so poor etc\" philosophy. As I've said, they may not be poor. It is simply about making up for putting black people 50 meters back." ]
>	[ "/u/bennetthaselton (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.\nAll comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.\nPlease note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else?", ">\n\nI'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.\nI don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races. If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?\nI think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it. But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.\nI do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Guymandudefish (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nFlat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. \nFor example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. \nFor example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! \nBy making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. \nIn practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone.", ">\n\nI would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else).", ">\n\nI had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from?", ">\n\nNowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world", ">\n\nI hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves.", ">\n\nInteresting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders", ">\n\nI can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be.", ">\n\nAfrican Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place", ">\n\nI understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves should get something if they are struggling.", ">\n\nSome of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer", ">\n\nIs that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance.", ">\n\nI don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.\nNow that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.\nIt doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.\nAll that oil was used to build the USA.\nSo are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it?", ">\n\nWhat exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees.", ">\n\nThis is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nWell it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need?", ">\n\nI am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.\n(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it. Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.)", ">\n\nWell if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.\nA race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? \nThe other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past?", ">\n\nWell maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nAnd how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. \nYou keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't?", ">\n\nI'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life. And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.\nIn other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.\nAdditionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.\nBasically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:\n1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime\n2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty\n3) should NOT factor in \"payback\" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2.", ">\n\nIf we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?\nYou want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community?", ">\n\nCan you clarify, are you saying:\n1) \"You haven't specified how this should be done\" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.\nor:\n2) \"You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born\" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.\nAlso, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born?", ">\n\n\nAlso, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as \"emotional distress\" in other types of legal scenarios.\n\nContext gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-\nIs there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? \nI've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of the concept.", ">\n\nTo me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. \nNeed based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.", ">\n\nI think there are a lot of individual statements here that are each worth breaking off into their own thread, to separate any follow-up back-and-forth. I also have a habit of taking vague statements and formulating every possible precise interpretation of them, in order to address each interpretation individually.\n\"Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps\" -- well, it depends on what you mean by \"fill the gaps\" and how much \"need based support\".\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty (as well as solve other wealth-related problems even if the person is not literally below the poverty line), it seems obvious to me that if this can be achieved at all, the only way to do it is by need-based support. You can try taxing the rich and handing out the benefits to the poor -- hopefully this will work, but if it doesn't work, it would make no sense to start targeting payments based on race (instead of to the poorest people who actually need it).", ">\n\n\nIf by \"fill the gaps\" you mean lift every person out of poverty \n\nNot what I mean at all. The problem I am referring to is not poverty, but rather the unequal burden of poverty on black people in the US. Reparations is not about solving poverty in general, but about having a more equitable distribution of wealth. \nAgain - this doesn't mean that poverty in general isn't also a problem we need to address.", ">\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more. By doing reparations, you aren't achieving anything.", ">\n\n\nIf you spend all this money and effort redistributing wealth, at the end of the day, there's the same amount of suffering as there was before. Actually there's probably more.\n\nWhy do you think this? This is a big claim and you haven't argued why you think it's true.", ">\n\nIt's not like you've lowered poverty, you've just spread it out more equally among races. And it took resources to do that, which had to come from somewhere.", ">\n\nYou still aren't making an actual argument. Why would redistributive policies \"spread poverty?\" What new resources are being used to do that which weren't already being used? How will those resources increase poverty overall?", ">\n\nWell considering that reparations aren't happening, new resources would need to be used, and they'd have to come from somewhere. And in the end, it would achieve less than a general program helping with poverty while simultaneously furthering the political divide in America.", ">\n\nI don't disagree that some people would be mad about it, but a lot of those same people would be just as mad about generalized programs to help impoverished people, so I don't really think that's a meaningful argument. \nAs to new resources, you could just enact a pretty mild tax on the wealthiest people in our country to take care of a one time reparation payout. I don't really see it as a huge burden on our resources. \nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?", ">\n\nThe people who would be mad about reparations are 90% of non black people since it's incredibly racist. I want more effective help for the poor, but I'd rather commit tax fraud than pay reparations. \n\nNow you asserted that this policy would \"spread poverty.\" Can you explain why you think that?\n\nIt depends on how reparations would be enacted. If it's just taking from the wealthy, it wouldn't increase poverty. But reparations would cost trillions. The money for this isn't just gonna come from Elon Musk and Bill Gates, especially since in terms of actual income, they don't make that much (99.9% of their net worth is in stock). Just giving $1000 to every black person would cost around $40 billion. This money would almost entirely come from the middle class. \nPlus, reparations are stupid. I've seen many people advocate for lump sum payments, which is the most stupid of them all. Give a person $50k and chances are it'll be gone in a week. If we space it out, well now you've basically just expanded existing welfare programs, except you've also managed to enrage most non black people.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for. \n\nHow are so sure of this?\nI recall distinctly, it was 1980, my grandfather, a relatively successful businessman tried once again to get a loan to buy a home outside the city and in the suburbs. \nI will never forget he said, I will try to talk to a young white banker, maybe they don't know to hate black people yet.\nWhen he came back, utterly dejected because he was not approved yet again, he said, don't forget, even the young ones hate negroes (that \n was his phrase for black people, of course he was born in 1920)\nRedlining OFFICIALLY ended in 1968, but unofficially, it continued WELL after that.\nTo say that young banker who rejected my Grandfather all those years ago is no longer alive is a bit sketchy.\nFor those asking, yes about 6 or so years later, he was finally approved for the loan, he was so happy that he took the whole family to see that movie the Golden Child. That was a good day.", ">\n\n\nIn other words, need-based wealth transfer makes more moral sense to me than \"reparations\" for things that nobody currently alive was responsible for.\n\nI should have added, \"... although it is legitimate to be compensated for things that happened to you specifically, in your lifetime.\" That would include compensation for things like what happened to your grandfather if he were still alive -- it would be difficult to do that accurately, but it's legitimate to try.\nWhat I'm saying is there's no point in trying to compensate for things that happened 100 years ago. Give people financial assistance based on their status today; if people are lower-income because of what happened 100 years ago, that will be priced in to a financial-assistance-based program.\nGlad you enjoyed the movie. Hope your grandfather smiled when Eddie said \"Yeah Imma paddle, Imma a paddle his ass!\"...", ">\n\nI think there are two different types on inequality, both of which need to be addressed.\n\n\nInequality between groups\n\n\nInequality between individuals\n\n\nReducing the inequality between groups makes sense to me because 1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way. 2. Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them.\nThe reparations seem to be focused more on solving the former inequality.\nThe inequality between individuals I think we will never fully solve, but it could (and in my opinion should) be reduced.", ">\n\nRegarding reducing inequality between groups, I think your statement \"1. No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" -- while I agree with that statement, I think it's an argument against doing wealth transfers based on what group you're in.\nBecause under a group-based payment system, a person who is poor and who happens to be in the group that is poorer on average, is going to get a payment, but a person who is equally poor but happens to be a member of the wealthier group, is not.\nHence, I think the statement \"No one type of person deserves more or less wealth (and thus power) just on the basis of having been born a certain way\" is an argument in favor of paying poor people equally regardless of the average wealth of the group they happen to be in.\nThe second reason -- \"Differences in wealth between groups can cause tensions between them\" -- is more thought-provoking. Before I had naively said, essentially, \"If you redistribute wealth so that you have the same number of rich and poor people, but now it's evenly distributed across the races instead of being skewed way, have you really achieved anything?\" I had implied the answer was No. But perhaps you could argue that the same amount of wealth and poverty, evenly distributed across races, would actually leave people better off, because you remove the additional toll of the resentment and tension between races, etc.\nΔ", ">\n\nConfirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Rainbow_Frog1 (1∆).\n^Delta System Explained ^\| ^Deltaboards", ">\n\nWhat if I’m rich despite my ancestors objectively being exploited?\nHow is it just that the people who took our property get to keep it?", ">\n\nThe people who took your property are dead.", ">\n\nOkay? \nThat doesn’t really answer the question. If I stole your dad’s house, then I died, you don’t get it back?", ">\n\nMy dad would get it back.", ">\n\nAnd if he was dead would you get it? Or does my son get to keep your stolen property?", ">\n\nThe second. You cannot inherit “property the testator should have possessed but didn’t” — and this situation is exactly why. \nNo property, real or personal, would ever be safe if someone could say “2000 years ago, my ancestors were unjustly deprived of this.”", ">\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one. \nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. So people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.”\nDescribe in terms of justice (Rawlsian justice) why it ought to be the way it is.", ">\n\n\nYeah, you’ve suddenly switched to a legal argument when the question is an ethical one.\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals. \nIf you found out that your great-great-uncle swindled your neighbor’s great-great-great-grandmother out of $50, would you feel an ethical obligation to make your neighbor “whole”?\nBefore you answer, remember that $50 wisely invested for a century would be worth $100,000 or more. \n\nObviously, if we implemented reparations, we would now be able to say “see? That’s why we have reparations laws. \n\nWe have laws around probate because without them, property would be an unutterable mess. \nWhat would a reparation law accomplish? \n\nSo people can’t simply steal things and use the proceeds of theft to form a trust and wash away the crime.\n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\nHuman nature is difficult to predict, but I feel confident in saying, no, that isn’t going to happen.", ">\n\n\nEthical questions involve the choices of individuals.\n\nAre you saying, you don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t? \n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice. \n\nYour theory is, thieves are deterred by the possibility that 150 years in the future, their descendants, and random other people, will be forced to give money to other people, some of whom are descended from their victims?\n\nNo. Are you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\nYou seem to think deterrence is the only theory of justice. It’s not. Rawlsian justice is about establishing a system in which there is no preferred agent. A system that preferentially rewards the families of dead thieves is not just.", ">\n\n\nyou don’t think there’s a difference between an ethical criminal justice system and one that isn’t?\n\nAn ethical justice system would be like an ethical toaster or an ethical comet — the result of applying the word where it could not possibly apply. \n\n\nWhat would a reparation law accomplish?\n\nJustice.\n\nGiving one person’s money to another because you feel like it is not justice. \nThere is no articulable principle of justice that reparations would uphold.\nMy girlfriend broke up with me and started dating another guy. That was unfair. Are you going to go make him pay me reparation?\nLess fancifully, my father was not admitted to an Ivy because of antisemitic policies. As a probable result, I will inherit considerable less money when he dies. Does every gentile owe me money?\nMy daughter had trouble getting into a good college because she’s Asian. Does every black person owe her money?\n\nAre you unfamiliar with restorative justice?\n\nDoes it mean anyone mugged by a black guy is owed money by every black person?", ">\n\nWhether a policy makes sense or not is entirely dependent on the goals it aims to achieve. Depending on the goal both could make more sense than the other. If the goal is well being in the utilitarian sense which it seems your argument assumes, then I would agree with you, but from what I can tell reparations isn’t utilitarian it’s primarily about justice. It is about the US government correcting a historical wrong it created. Under these circumstances reparations clearly makes more sense.", ">\n\nI agree that is apparently the goal, I just think that concept of \"justice\" falls apart under scrutiny, if the real victims are dead, and you're just trying to give money to people who are not the victims, but just biologically descended from them. Suppose that instead of being the victims of a crime, your ancestors were the perpetrators. Should you be punished instead of compensated? If that logic doesn't work for punishment, why should it work for victimhood compensation?\nThat's why I prefer the utilitarian approach of just helping people who need it now.", ">\n\nThe big problem is that there is always intense opposition to any kind of policy designed to create greater economic equality. Being rich inherently gives you more political influence, and almost all rich people are obviously going to be opposed to sharing their wealth with others.\nIn reality, either reparations for slavery or a broader shift towards economic equality will be extremely hard to achieve. Telling people who are campaigning for the former that they should campaign for the latter is a bit like telling a firefighter who is trying and failing to put out a small part of a fire that they should instead focus on putting out the entire fire at once.\nThough another factor is that slavery reparations are something that wealthy Black people can get behind - in fact, wealthy people in general can get behind it, knowing that it doesn't threaten their wealth in the same way that a broader shift towards something like socialism would.\n\nPractically, by focusing on need-based aid, you can achieve part of that by providing general-purpose programs that disproportionately benefit the poor, like free health care and free education.\n\nMany countries have done this to some extent, but most of them continue to allow the rich to access their own elite medical and educational institutions, and people constantly have to campaign to maintain public funding for state schools and hospitals. There isn't a quick fix to economic inequality. It seems to be an eternal struggle.\nI also think you're ignoring the complicated interplay between economic and non-economic forms of inequality and prejudice, and that they both seem to reinforce each other. The higher poverty rates among ethnic minority groups aren't purely down to the lack of inherited wealth: they're also down to the prejudice and discrimination that members of those groups have faced themselves. But of course, much of that prejudice ultimately stems from their ancestors being poor. There is an argument that creating economic equality between races could help to rapidly reduce those other forms of prejudice.", ">\n\nWell if you're asking whether it's easy to sell the public on \"reparations\" or \"inequality-reducing wealth transfer\", it seems the obvious question is \"how much in reparations\" vs. \"how much in inequality-reducing wealth transfer\".\nSo assume you're talking about shifting the same amount of money. On the one hand, yes reparations may have more support from some rich Black people (but less than you might think - richer Black Americans are more likely to skew conservative, and even if they didn't, they might think it was just a bad look to be asking for reparations!). On the other hand, I think this would be outweighed by the fact that reparations are morally harder to defend than wealth transfers to help the poor.\nSo I posit that for given fixed amount of money, inequality-reducing wealth transfers would be easier to sell politically than reparations. Do you think that's not the case?", ">\n\nIf any of the family members of the recipient have committed a violent crime than all of that families reparation money should go to the victim of that crime. It only makes sense", ">\n\nI think universal basic income is a better answer to this underlying problem than either needs-based or race-based assistance. If the fundamental issue you're working to resolve is the degree to which generational wealth produces unevenness of opportunity in a society, than providing everyone with an equal economic floor is going to be the most straightforward and effective way of getting that done.\nWith that said, I think your objection to reparations comes from a different perspective as my own, and from a bit of a misunderstanding of how reparations function:\n\nReparations come from institutions, not from individuals -- e.g.,, they're a payment made by a nation, for crimes that it committed against another nation or group of people. \nSince the US is the same state that perpetrated / benefited from slavery, the argument that nobody alive participated is moot; if reparations were to be paid, the payer is the same in 2023 as it would have been in 1823.\nThe major challenge is that the entities and individuals that the USA harmed are not still in existence. There is no African state that the US damaged via the slave trade, as none of them existed then. Similarly, there are no US citizens that the US committed crimes against via the slave trade, because:\nThe thing they did was not, at the time, a crime\nThe people they committed the crime against were not, at the time, citizens\n\nIf the goal is to combat inequality, reparations aren't a particularly useful way of doing it; if it's to settle damages caused by unlawful conduct by the US government (ie, what reparations are for), then there's no party with standing, and the actions in question were legal at the time.", ">\n\nReparations or financial support won't do shit. Reparations would be wasted due to America's putting black people in bad neighborhoods and making sure they own damn near nothing, everything is rented and education is purposely shit, even more than usual. Financial aid is just a weak lifeline to be taken by the next politician that enters the fray. The effects of slavery will never be undone until there's a drastic change for the whole of the working class. \nI'm not holding my breath.", ">\n\nBut this just sounds like an argument for more (or more targeted) need-based aid, to give people a chance at owning instead of renting, and/or make the bad neighborhoods better.\nHowever you want to do it, the only point I’m making is that it shouldn’t be based on things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nNo. I'm talking about drastic economic change. \nDamage cannot be undone in a Capitalist framework. Helping people and bettering the lives of the working class is not profitable, and therefore won't happen.\nTargeted aid is not going to do a thing, it's putting bandaids on an axe wound. Only by flipping our entire economy to properly serve those who actually have a purpose, the working class, can a real solution be built. Changing all lives, not just one group.", ">\n\nhow does need based aid address financial disparities and existing discrimination of minorities that prevent them from achieving as much financially? Things such as redlining would not be addressed with need based aid and where would the money come from? if not from the pockets of whites families who obtain generational wealth starting from slavery or any horrific historical event then idk how it equates to reparations or evens the playing field. Also just curious what brought this question up😅 it’s not like black ppl have gotten or will ever likely receive reparations", ">\n\n\"how does need based aid address financial disparities\" - isn't that pretty much by definition what need-based aid addresses?\n\"how does need based aid address existing discrimination of minorities\" -- that depends on how much that still exists. Do people think that if a Black guy and a white guy apply for the same tech job, and they have the same certifications and other qualifications, that the white guy is more likely to get the job? Has anyone shown any evidence of that happening for people with similar qualifications?\nMy understanding was that the bigger program today was financial barriers that prevent lower-income people (which disproportionately affects people of color, of course) from attaining those certifications and experiences in the first place. Not that the employer was throwing away resumes of Black candidates.", ">\n\nmost need based aid doesn’t address financial difficulties in a way that makes things equal so no.\nDefinitely does exist and i’m not sure why you’re making this post if you’re not going to address that I even gave an example “redlining” there are also disparities in work places you can look up stats yourself.\nyour last part just confused me all together not sure what you’re even addressing 😂", ">\n\nI know there are workplace disparities, I asked if you had any evidence that it happens at the hiring stage, i.e. if a Black guy and a white guy with the same qualifications apply for the same tech job. (As opposed to wealth inequality which produces inequalities in the number of people who are able to get the qualifications in the first place.)", ">\n\nwhy does it matter if it happens at the hiring stage or if it happens later down the line? It definitely does still happen tho but wage gaps are still a thing in the workforce so whether or not you get hired isn’t really the issue. That’s all irrelevant tho as it still doesn’t address the multivariate issues that surround livelihood of black people. Let’s say you beat the odds got a good job they pay you what you’re worth you’re supposed to be on the same level as your white peers yet you have to pay more money when selling your home and trying to move simply because you’re black. I think if you should propose anything instead of reparations it should be to fix the different systems that unjustly discriminate against black people because need based assistance simply wouldn’t address all the variables", ">\n\nAn easier example may be neurodivergent people. Even if you pay people below a certain income level, you'll still need extra money for neurodivergent people since they're navigating a world designed for neurotypical people.", ">\n\nI agree this makes sense as an adjunct to need-based aid. However I’m technically not taking a position on what kind of need-based aid is best; only that it shouldn’t take into account things that happened before you were born.", ">\n\nYou can't rectify a past injustice with a future injustice. \nReparations is just straight up racist bullshit. It's the same argument used to support policies treating races differently (affirmative action). I grew up on the value that your supposed to treat everyone equally regardless of what they look like. I will not accept a fucking penny from my neighbor just because their skin color is different from mine. That is morally repugnant.", ">\n\nOK, although I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing, since I said I was arguing for an alternative to reparations.", ">\n\nI think you had a good methodology and approach and I agree with your findings that it would be better comparatively, however, I caution against establishing a welfare state. That is similar to what we have now. The\"War on Poverty\" was started by Johnson in 64', since then, trillions have been spent and we have seen negative repercussions, not positive benefits. The idea is there, the passion is solid and wanting to do good is admirable but if your experiment has negative unintended consequences and your goal is not reached after 60 years, maybe the approach is wrong. \nDr Milton Freedman delves into this quite a bit. It has to do with human nature. It's like the animals in the wild, there is a reason your not supposed to feed them, they become dependant. If your advocating for a dependency government, that is an entirely separate conversation that would be interesting, otherwise providing too many handouts is extremely dangerous and demoralizing to generations. \nIf you provide a commodity to a poor person were they lose that commodity if they achieve more, you have incentivized them to remain poor. Providing for themselves at a higher level reduces the products they receive and could place them in a relatively, by their perspective, worse situation. No parent wants to work harder so they can provide less for their child but that's exactly the effect some of these programs have. Now imagine growing up generation after generation on welfare, where ambition and striving to support yourself are not the most pursued values. Don't mistake what I'm saying for lazyness. \nThere is a very serious and honest conversation that needs to take place about how politicians have fucked over generations of people, by incentivizing them to remain poor. It's disgusting, demoralizing and morally repugnant.", ">\n\nWell that shows that poverty plus drips and drabs of government assistance do not make you better off.\nBut kids who are born into wealthy families generally do better than kids who are born into poor ones. This suggests there is some amount of money that helps!\nIn any case, providing public services that are always free (like free college and free health care) would seem to avoid some of the problems you're describing, since you don't have to deliberately remain poor in order to be eligible.", ">\n\nAbsolutely right. The issue I have with government subsidized education and healthcare comes down to the Quality-Cost-Universality triangle. As you making something more universal the quality goes down, cost goes up. This is because these are scarcities and providing something for free does not create more of that thing but it sure does increase demand for it which reduces the supply which leads to rationing. \nWith healthcare, universal healthcare only works if you ban private healthcare. This has to do with profit motive and less physicians are willing to go $250K + rigorous medical school for sub optimal government wages compared to a private market. So banning private restricts competition because the government sets industry wages, not a free market system. This will invariably reduce the supply of physicians as well. As supply is reduced or at the least, steady, demand skyrockets from universality. This increases wait times and decreases availability. With less return on investment costs, there is less incentive to build more hospitals which has follow-on effects years later which also reduces medical emergency services coverage. There is also a generalized fear that standards in medical schools will drop to help meet the demand. The amount of time a person gets with their physician will also decrease as that physicians patient count increases. All this doesn't account for the issue of the government setting wage limits on physicians/medical staff as opposed to the free market system. This is essentially a government telling you what your labor is worth and you can take it or do something else. It's a form of coerced slavery that I find morally repugnant. \nRelatively the same issues can be had through subsidized schools.", ">\n\nThis hypotetical case: my father lived in a house that the family had owned for generations. The king came and stole the house and evicted the father, because the king wanted to have a house for visiting. The king and my father is dead. Both me and the Kings son live in our own appartments, is able to support ourselves and is living a good life with no need of support. But both of us would like us to live in the house. The lawyers should now decide if i or the Kings son is the rightful owner of the house. Who should own the house?", ">\n\nReparations aren’t about the individual. They’re about collective responsibility. \nIt’s about the government—which was directly responsible for some awful act in the past—making restitution for that crime. \nThe government needs to make reparations for the crimes it enacted even if there isn’t a way to figure out who the recipients ought to be because too many records were destroyed or too much time has passed. The manner by which that reparation gets paid might be hard to figure out, but the need to pay it is morally pretty straightforward.\nPeople just don’t like the idea of paying the bill.", ">\n\nYou argue that need-based beats reparations. I argue that while need-based clearly has merit, reparations cannot be replaced by need-based because all black people were set back in many ways and thus deserve a boost forward EVEN IF THEY ARE NOT POOR. \nYou define reparations as payments for the mistreatment of your ancestors not of yourself. The problem is, the mistreatment of black ancestors has set black people back today. Maybe Jack would be rich if Jack's dad with top law school grades was able to be hired by the top law firm. Or if Jack's dad was able to get into law school. Because he was not, Jack doesn't get the head start an upper middle class rich-ish kid would get. And because of that, Jack goes to worse grade schools and doesnt see black people in white collar jobs (esp his dad) so doesnt identify with that lifestyle, doesnt pursue it as readily, and suddenly his potential has shrunk greatly.\nIn short, black people have been moved 50 meters behind the starting line generations ago. Then, eventually, the laws and attitudes changed to today, where subtle racism (and rare overt racism) still exists in the US but generally speaking no one is being denied jobs, housing, service, etc for being black. The key is this: when we removed the laws that put them 50 meters back, we left them wherever they were. We did not move them forward whatsoever, nevermind forward 50 meters to where they would be without the racist restrictions on them. \nJack's son, present day, can be whatever he wants. But he too does not have all the advantages that he wouldve had, had Jack's dad not been held back generations ago. It seems entirely reasonable to me that Jack's son receive some form of reparations to, for example, get him into a better grade school. A school which he theoretically would have been attending anyway, had his grandpa had the opportunity he should have had. Or maybe it's about going from a good school to a great school! Some black people are not poor, but all suffered being moved back, and thus all deserve to be moved forward to compensate for this. \nNote, that doesnt mean re-litigating anything. What it means it trying to give them a boost to balance the setbacks the gov caused them. The lucky ones who have really thrived since then should not be disentitled from compensation for these imposed setbacks just because they managed to have some success. It is fair to assume that without the setbacks, the lucky ones would be even further along, so in making things right the gov has a duty to help them get back where they would be. \nThis all comes from the principle of paying for the wrongs you caused. Lucky ones were still wronged (by basically having generations of forced poverty, lack of education, etc until recently) and thus still must be compensated EVEN THOUGH they recovered well from the wrong. If you are shot, narrowly avoid dying, and go on to become a super fit triathlete, you still get compensated for bodily harm caused to you in spite of the fact that you recovered from that wrong well. Here, you might say the wrong was passed down to you instead of hitting you directly, but it still poisoned your family, your community, and these impacts still unmistakably affect your life in huge ways. That deserves compensation. \nFinal note -- it isnt even about some utilitarian \"we have to help the disadvantaged black people bc theyre so poor etc\" philosophy. As I've said, they may not be poor. It is simply about making up for putting black people 50 meters back.", ">\n\nI think that \"need-based\" was the wrong word because it implies helping only the poor. I probably should have said \"wealth transfers based on current wealth levels\". (Where I'm using \"wealth\" loosely to include current income and projected earnings, etc.)\nIn other words, if two groups of people are working equally hard, but due to the disadvantaged circumstances that the first group grew up in, the people in the first group make $70K a year and the people in the second group make $130K a year, \"wealth transfers\" could include transfers from the second group to the first group, even though the first group is not \"poor\".\nI'm just saying \"the first group\" should be defined by the disadvantaged circumstances that they personally faced. People of any race should be eligible and it should not include payback for things that happened before they were born." ]
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>	[ "This is a friendly reminder to read our rules.\nRemember, /r/Showerthoughts is for showerthoughts, not \"thoughts had in the shower!\"\n(For an explanation of what a \"showerthought\" is, please read this page.)\nRule-breaking posts may result in bans." ]
Chinese spy balloon was watching ‘sensitive military sites’ and program has been targeting US for years GOP has been complaining that Biden took too long to take action. Biden waited until it could be brought down without risk to others. Trump just let it happen. Three times. Now Republicans are pretending like they don't have a double standard, criticizing Biden but saying nothing about Trump.	[]
> Supposedly Biden wanted to shoot it down days earlier, but the military said it was getting good data from studying what the balloon was transmitting and convinced him to wait	[ "Chinese spy balloon was watching ‘sensitive military sites’ and program has been targeting US for years\n\nGOP has been complaining that Biden took too long to take action. Biden waited until it could be brought down without risk to others. Trump just let it happen. Three times. Now Republicans are pretending like they don't have a double standard, criticizing Biden but saying nothing about Trump." ]
> and they still get to pick it up and see what it was was on it. the fact that this happened at least 3 times during rumps time in office and nothing was done should scare you.	[ "Chinese spy balloon was watching ‘sensitive military sites’ and program has been targeting US for years\n\nGOP has been complaining that Biden took too long to take action. Biden waited until it could be brought down without risk to others. Trump just let it happen. Three times. Now Republicans are pretending like they don't have a double standard, criticizing Biden but saying nothing about Trump.", ">\n\nSupposedly Biden wanted to shoot it down days earlier, but the military said it was getting good data from studying what the balloon was transmitting and convinced him to wait" ]
> and nothing was done should scare you. Not just nothing was done, but nothing was even noticed.	[ "Chinese spy balloon was watching ‘sensitive military sites’ and program has been targeting US for years\n\nGOP has been complaining that Biden took too long to take action. Biden waited until it could be brought down without risk to others. Trump just let it happen. Three times. Now Republicans are pretending like they don't have a double standard, criticizing Biden but saying nothing about Trump.", ">\n\nSupposedly Biden wanted to shoot it down days earlier, but the military said it was getting good data from studying what the balloon was transmitting and convinced him to wait", ">\n\nand they still get to pick it up and see what it was was on it. the fact that this happened at least 3 times during rumps time in office and nothing was done should scare you." ]
> Musta been noticed. If not we wouldn’t know about these three’s	[ "Chinese spy balloon was watching ‘sensitive military sites’ and program has been targeting US for years\n\nGOP has been complaining that Biden took too long to take action. Biden waited until it could be brought down without risk to others. Trump just let it happen. Three times. Now Republicans are pretending like they don't have a double standard, criticizing Biden but saying nothing about Trump.", ">\n\nSupposedly Biden wanted to shoot it down days earlier, but the military said it was getting good data from studying what the balloon was transmitting and convinced him to wait", ">\n\nand they still get to pick it up and see what it was was on it. the fact that this happened at least 3 times during rumps time in office and nothing was done should scare you.", ">\n\n\nand nothing was done should scare you.\n\nNot just nothing was done, but nothing was even noticed." ]
> This doesn't cause any anxiety response in me. Russia has been flying spy satellites over us for a long time. If it's electronic surveillance of frequencies I'd be a little more concerned but I think it would be cheaper and easier to just send a few student spies over here with some receivers. The whole thing looks so amateurish and clunky that I could see how it really could just be collecting weather data. Regardless, if it's flying in our airspace without prior permission then we should shoot it down. Done and done.	[ "Chinese spy balloon was watching ‘sensitive military sites’ and program has been targeting US for years\n\nGOP has been complaining that Biden took too long to take action. Biden waited until it could be brought down without risk to others. Trump just let it happen. Three times. Now Republicans are pretending like they don't have a double standard, criticizing Biden but saying nothing about Trump.", ">\n\nSupposedly Biden wanted to shoot it down days earlier, but the military said it was getting good data from studying what the balloon was transmitting and convinced him to wait", ">\n\nand they still get to pick it up and see what it was was on it. the fact that this happened at least 3 times during rumps time in office and nothing was done should scare you.", ">\n\n\nand nothing was done should scare you.\n\nNot just nothing was done, but nothing was even noticed.", ">\n\nMusta been noticed. If not we wouldn’t know about these three’s" ]
> The simplest explanation to me is that they just wanted to see how we'd respond to something flying over our airspace. I mean the Chinese are kinda slapdash in how they construct their shit but they're not stupid.	[ "Chinese spy balloon was watching ‘sensitive military sites’ and program has been targeting US for years\n\nGOP has been complaining that Biden took too long to take action. Biden waited until it could be brought down without risk to others. Trump just let it happen. Three times. Now Republicans are pretending like they don't have a double standard, criticizing Biden but saying nothing about Trump.", ">\n\nSupposedly Biden wanted to shoot it down days earlier, but the military said it was getting good data from studying what the balloon was transmitting and convinced him to wait", ">\n\nand they still get to pick it up and see what it was was on it. the fact that this happened at least 3 times during rumps time in office and nothing was done should scare you.", ">\n\n\nand nothing was done should scare you.\n\nNot just nothing was done, but nothing was even noticed.", ">\n\nMusta been noticed. If not we wouldn’t know about these three’s", ">\n\nThis doesn't cause any anxiety response in me.\nRussia has been flying spy satellites over us for a long time. If it's electronic surveillance of frequencies I'd be a little more concerned but I think it would be cheaper and easier to just send a few student spies over here with some receivers. \nThe whole thing looks so amateurish and clunky that I could see how it really could just be collecting weather data. Regardless, if it's flying in our airspace without prior permission then we should shoot it down. Done and done." ]
> China can definitely build quality products if the price is right.	[ "Chinese spy balloon was watching ‘sensitive military sites’ and program has been targeting US for years\n\nGOP has been complaining that Biden took too long to take action. Biden waited until it could be brought down without risk to others. Trump just let it happen. Three times. Now Republicans are pretending like they don't have a double standard, criticizing Biden but saying nothing about Trump.", ">\n\nSupposedly Biden wanted to shoot it down days earlier, but the military said it was getting good data from studying what the balloon was transmitting and convinced him to wait", ">\n\nand they still get to pick it up and see what it was was on it. the fact that this happened at least 3 times during rumps time in office and nothing was done should scare you.", ">\n\n\nand nothing was done should scare you.\n\nNot just nothing was done, but nothing was even noticed.", ">\n\nMusta been noticed. If not we wouldn’t know about these three’s", ">\n\nThis doesn't cause any anxiety response in me.\nRussia has been flying spy satellites over us for a long time. If it's electronic surveillance of frequencies I'd be a little more concerned but I think it would be cheaper and easier to just send a few student spies over here with some receivers. \nThe whole thing looks so amateurish and clunky that I could see how it really could just be collecting weather data. Regardless, if it's flying in our airspace without prior permission then we should shoot it down. Done and done.", ">\n\nThe simplest explanation to me is that they just wanted to see how we'd respond to something flying over our airspace. I mean the Chinese are kinda slapdash in how they construct their shit but they're not stupid." ]
> I'm just saying that people tend to equate low quality products with stupidity which just isn't true.	[ "Chinese spy balloon was watching ‘sensitive military sites’ and program has been targeting US for years\n\nGOP has been complaining that Biden took too long to take action. Biden waited until it could be brought down without risk to others. Trump just let it happen. Three times. Now Republicans are pretending like they don't have a double standard, criticizing Biden but saying nothing about Trump.", ">\n\nSupposedly Biden wanted to shoot it down days earlier, but the military said it was getting good data from studying what the balloon was transmitting and convinced him to wait", ">\n\nand they still get to pick it up and see what it was was on it. the fact that this happened at least 3 times during rumps time in office and nothing was done should scare you.", ">\n\n\nand nothing was done should scare you.\n\nNot just nothing was done, but nothing was even noticed.", ">\n\nMusta been noticed. If not we wouldn’t know about these three’s", ">\n\nThis doesn't cause any anxiety response in me.\nRussia has been flying spy satellites over us for a long time. If it's electronic surveillance of frequencies I'd be a little more concerned but I think it would be cheaper and easier to just send a few student spies over here with some receivers. \nThe whole thing looks so amateurish and clunky that I could see how it really could just be collecting weather data. Regardless, if it's flying in our airspace without prior permission then we should shoot it down. Done and done.", ">\n\nThe simplest explanation to me is that they just wanted to see how we'd respond to something flying over our airspace. I mean the Chinese are kinda slapdash in how they construct their shit but they're not stupid.", ">\n\nChina can definitely build quality products if the price is right." ]

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