The issue of reparations for slavery is once again dominating headlines. In a time of heightened racial tension in America and beyond, the question of whether today’s society should atone financially for the transgressions of their forefathers has returned, but, as with many other topics that are fertile ground for virtue signalling, while there are plenty of proponents of the principle, it is more difficult to find concrete proposals for how it could be achieved.
But it is in the detail that controversy lies, because the basic principle of paying reparations to victims of crime is one most people, including libertarians, can agree on. Murray Rothbard tackled the issue in his 1969 article Confiscation and the Homestead Principle, where he recognised the legitimate claim of slaves to be compensated for slavery, based on the homestead principle, according to which land “justly belongs to the person who finds, occupies, and transforms it by his labor”:
“The slaves gained their freedom, it is true, but the land, the plantations that they had tilled and therefore deserved to own under the homestead principle, remained in the hands of their former masters. Furthermore, no reparations were granted the slaves for their oppression out of the hides of their masters. Hence the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day.”
In other words, reparations are compulsory compensation for property violations of the past. If my ancestor had a certain property taken from him by force, then, as his legal heir, but for the theft I would have been the present legitimate owner. The passing of time and the potential transfer of the property from person to person does not change that it is stolen property. The question isn’t, therefore, one of whether the principle of reparations is legitimate, but rather, one of from whom to whom such compensatory claims should be paid. Because reparations are not an abstract, they must be based on concretely identifiable property rights. The transfer of title to property which is claimed to be stolen relies on proof of what property was stolen, from whom and by whom.
And this is where things get more difficult, because the debate of reparations, as it is currently undertaken in mainstream debate, strays from this basic principle of legal justice. It centres on one group of people (black Americans) receiving compensation from another group (American taxpayers) for a crime the object of which is not concretely valued (though a recent scholarly effort reached a figure of 9 quadrillion, about $151 million due to each black American – an absurd number). This “solution” effectively tries to make amends for one crime by committing another, punishing American taxpayers as a group for illegitimate actions that they have not been proven beneficiaries of, because no individual guilt or innocence has been established. The argument that the reparations lobby would make, and which is closely connected to the controversial concept of white privilege, is that all white people have benefitted as a group from slavery and all blacks have suffered, and hence compensation is justified on the basis of group identity. But as individualists, libertarians easily reject this “guilt by association” logic, and what’s more, it makes no logical sense. Taxpayers who descend from slave owners and those who do not; those whose ancestors arrived before emancipation and those whose didn’t; those who descend from abolitionists and those who don’t; all exhibit different personal benefits from slavery. What about descendants of black slave owners? What if your great-great grandfather built a fortune on slavery, but your great grandfather subsequently lost everything? How have you benefited? What about those who descend from white labourers who had to compete with the free labour provided by slaves and received lower wages as a result?
Without establishing individual guilt or innocence by tracing titles to specific property today to land homesteaded by identified individuals in slavery, justice can’t be served. That may be unjust, but innumerable crimes throughout history have gone unpunished; slavery is by no means unique in having caused human tragedy that would offer grounds for compensation. That should not preclude cases being brought for reparations where old plantations and their heirs can be identified by descendants of former slaves. But as a society, we have no established tradition of – and no moral justification for – offering compensations to descendants of the victims of historical crimes on a collective basis. Slavery, for its barbarism and injustice, should be no different.