ravdin
Illuminator
- Joined
- Oct 16, 2005
- Messages
- 4,985
Why would Obama pay anything? The claim here is against *governments*, not against random people walking around. And before you even say it, there are two answers. First, every company's clients will likely pay more if the company get sued. But so what? If I pay for Sony products, and they have to raise their prices because of some disastrous flaw in a product, then that's too bad for me, the end.
Second, you're forgetting that black people in the US have spent a long time paying into the US system, and have had their wealth siphoned off to aid white people. If this is wrong, then the wealth should be given back. if it's okay, then you can't claim umbrage with reparations anyway.
By "government", you are of course referring to the people. We the people pay for the government to exist. So when you're talking about the government making payments, those payments are coming from certain people to other people. If that's what you believe should happen, just own it.
Your Sony example doesn't hold up because your participation in that company (as a customer or shareholder) is voluntary and you can divest at any time. The same's not true if you don't like how the government spends your money so you decide you'd rather not pay taxes.
I'm not opposed to reparations per se. A good example is that the US government paid $1.6 billion in reparations to Americans who had been incarcerated in prison camps during WWII for the crime of having Japanese ancestry. I think very few people would argue that reparations were due and had to be paid to those Americans who were wrongly imprisoned.
Your claim that wealth was "siphoned off" from black people to white people is simplistic and wrong. A small elite of almost exclusively white people benefited from the system at first, but I think if you went back to the antebellum or Jim Crow days, you wouldn't find that the vast majority of whites were enjoying the benefits of taking money from their black neighbors.
The best thing to do as I see it would be to level the playing field and open opportunities as widely as possible, without regard to ethnicity. I have a proposal that should promote more equality, but somehow I doubt it will gain wide acceptance: start accepting applicants to public universities at random, without regard to grades or SAT scores.