Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this piece giving a historical argument for reparations. He views it as a moral argument to correct a wrong. He doesn’t indicate what form reparations should take but points to Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, as a place to start. Conyer introduces the bill every year but he doesn’t have the backing to make it go anywhere.
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
The Mises Institute published a piece by Robert P. Murphy titled “Reparations for US Slavery? ” in response to Coates piece.
Reparations creates a whole bunch of problems like are the descendants of whites obligated to compensate blacks living today for the institutionalized racism within American history. Most people think not.
http://mises.ca/posts/blog/reparations-for-us-slavery/
I think both sides make compelling arguments and think this might be an interesting topic to debate..
Murray Rothbard wrote the following in chapter 11 of “The Ethics of Liberty”:
“It was only the coercion of slave labor that enabled the large plantation system in staple crops to flourish in the South. Without the ability to own and coerce the labor of others, the large plantations—and perhaps much of the tobacco and later the cotton culture—would not have pervaded the South.
“We have indicated above that there was only one possible moral solution for the slave question: immediate and unconditional abolition, with no compensation to the slavemasters. Indeed, any compensation should have been the other way—to repay the oppressed slaves for their lifetime of slavery. A vital part of such necessary compensation would have been to grant the plantation lands not to the slavemaster, who scarcely had valid title to any property, but to the slaves themselves, whose labor, on our “homesteading” principle, was mixed with the soil to develop the plantations. In short, at the very least, elementary libertarian justice required not only the immediate freeing of the slaves, but also the immediate turning over to the slaves, again without compensation to the masters, of the plantation lands on which they had worked and sweated. As it was, the victorious North made the same mistake—though “mistake” is far too charitable a word for an act that preserved the essence of an unjust and oppressive social system—as had Czar Alexander when he freed the Russian serfs in 1861: the bodies of the oppressed were freed, but the property which they had worked and eminently deserved to own, remained in the hands of their former oppressors. With the economic power thus remaining in their hands, the former lords soon found themselves virtual masters once more of what were now free tenants or farm laborers. The serfs and the slaves had tasted freedom, but had been cruelly deprived of its fruits.”
Rothbard was referring to what should have been done at that time but he is also making a moral argument.
