First published on the Internet on March 23, 2001. Since that time I have modified some of my views, but I decided to reprint this article as originally written.

David Horowitz thinks the government shouldn't pay reparations to black people on account of slavery. He's right. But the basis of Horowiz's belief is that the government allegedly doesn't *owe* any reparations. He's wrong.

Horowitz doesn't think black people have any moral claim against the government on account of slavery. He's wrong. But he denies the basis of this moral claim on the grounds that pressing such a claim would be counterproductive. He's right.

So Horowitz is right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons.

I have started my story in the middle. Let me give a little background.

Duke University, a prestigious institution in Durham, N. C., is (like many other colleges and universities in the country) embroiled in a dispute over an advertisement which the student newspaper printed just after students came back from spring break. The ad consists of an essay by David Horowitz, and the essay is called "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea *for Blacks*-and Racist Too" (emphasis in original). Horowitz tried to take out this ad in several campus newspapers. Some campus papers chose to run the ad; some chose not to run it. The latter papers may be accused of censorship, but that kind of censorship is also known as editing, and editing is what editors do.

The Duke student newspaper, the *Chronicle,* chose to run the ad. This was a good decision. Several years back, the *Chronicle* ran an ad by someone who denied the Holocaust. If the *Chronicle* had refused to run Horowitz's reparations ad, conservatives would have really enjoyed themselves, skewering the *Chronicle* because it ran an ad by a hard-core anti-semitic fruitcake while refusing to run an ad by a respected member of the mainstream conservative movement (the *Chronicle* editor, in the wake of the Horowitz controversy, says the *Chronicle* recently turned down another Holocaust-denial ad because it made unsubstianted accusations against an organization).

David Horowitz used to be a prominent leftist. In his younger days, he would probably have written an ad in *favor * of reparations, if the idea had occurred to him. Today, Horowitz is one of the country's leading conservative intellectuals. Horowitz has written about the personal transformation he went through in order to go from left to right. He goes out of his way to refute and repudiate the leftist doctrines which he used to champion.

He also seems to enjoy intellectual brawls. He says he placed his reparations ad in college newspapers in order to correct the one-sided leftist message on the subject which was allegedly being delivered on campuses throughout the land. Was there another motive? For years, Horowitz has been closely following the so-called "political correcness" trend in academia, and he knows exactly what buttons need to be pressed in order to activate the tolerance-and-diversity crowd. Is it a coincidence that Horowitz's ad just happened to push several of these buttons?

Some campus papers which ran the reparations ad later apologized for offending people. On a couple of campuses, students who were angry at the ad trashed copies of the papers in which the ad ran. On some campuses-including Duke-anti-ad demonstrators staged sit-ins and demonstrations. Duke's president said some soothing words about errors in the ad. The current position of the *Chronicle* is that the ad was a contribution to intellectual diversity. The demonstrators demand an printed apology from the *Chronicle* for printing the ad, plus free space for a rebuttal, plus a policy change to make sure that such ads are never published in the future. If the *Chronicle* fails to meet these demands, the demonstrators want Duke to pull its own ads from the paper. The *Chronicle* people won't make an apology, but they said they were willing to publish rebuttals as letters to the editor or as guest editorials. The editors also pointed out that the protestors can pay for a rebuttal ad at reduced rates (because they're Duke students). The President of Duke says she won't pull ads from the *Chronicle* as the demonstrators demand. More developments may be anticipated in this drama, at Duke and on other campuses which are dealing with the reparations ad.

Of course, Horowitz surely knew in advance that placing the reparations ad would have these kinds of results. He has denounced the people who want to censor his ad, calling them McCarthyites of the left and so on. But naturally, Horowitz must be quite pleased that those who protest his ad have engaged in precisely the kind of left-wing intolerance which he says is rampant on campus. If Horowitz is upset at the left-wing reaction to his ad, he is "upset" in the same sense that Brer Rabbit was upset at being thrown into the briar patch.

"Please, oh please, Brer Fox, do anything you want with me, but please don't censor my ad, thereby giving it nationwide free publicity and encouraging people to look up the ad on my Web site!"

"OK, Brer Horowitz, you asked for it! I'm going to censor your ad and hold a protest rally against the ad's publication!"

Let us now get to the meat of the matter, the actual ad itself. Certain activists and politicians have said that the government (apparently meaning the federal government, but perhaps including state governments) should pay reparations to black people who are descended from slaves. Horowitz sees the demand for reparations as "one more assault on America, conducted by racial separatists and the political left." Apparently, it isn't enough for Horowitz to denounce reparations as a bad idea-which it is. Horowitz must assail the supporters of reparations as wicked people, since only wicked people would want to assault America. But Horowitz used to be on the political left. Was Horowitz therefore wicked? And if he was wicked then, is he still wicked now? Or did he cleanse himself of his wickedness when he became a conservative?

The text of the ad is available at http://frontpagemag.com/notepad/default.htm. The ad is presented as a list of ten items, each of which is an argument against reparations. I will reproduce the headnotes from each of the ten points, and then summarize Horowitz's position. In the course of responding to Horowitz's remarks, I will hopefully clarify my own position on the reparations issue.

To avoid leaving the reader in suspense as to my own position, let me state now that I have three objections against reparations for slavery in the United States. First, although state governments and the federal government incurred a moral debt to the slaves which, in strict justice, ought to be repaid to the descendants of slaves, in practice it would be ruinous to carry out justice in this way. There is one simple reason: Reparations would cost too much money. The federal and state governments would have to bankrupt themselves, or put themselves into a bottomless pit of debt, in order to pay compensation for all the evils of slavery.

My second objection is that focusing on slavery that happened before the American Civil War distracts attention from real-world slavery which actually exists today. I'm not just talking about foreign countries like the Sudan; I am speaking of the United States, where the treatment of certain immigrants, particularly certain illegal immigrants, approaches, and sometimes crosses, the line between freedom and slavery. Let us deal with present-day slavery before dealing with slavery in past generations.

My third objection to reparations is similar to Horowitz's seventh objection, which I will reach in due course.

For the most part, although I agree with Horowitz's conclusions, I disagree with most of his reasons for reaching those conclusions, and I hope to illustrate this in my commentary.

As an additional comment, let me say that I recognize that discrimination against black people did not exactly end when the Civil War ended. The reason I focus on the issue of slavery is because that's the focus of Horowitz's ad.

Although Horowitz lists his ten reasons in the old, boring way, from #1 to #10, this represents a questionable practice. True, the earliest Top Ten lists-the Ten Commandments and the first ten amendments to the
U. S. Constitution-are numbered from 1 to 10, but modern Top 10 lists go from 10 to 1. I will follow the modern usage, taking up Horowitz's last point first, and vice-versa.

Ten
The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets African-Americans Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom

Horowitz thinks blacks are quintessentially American. Demanding reparations would be separatist and would reject
"America's social contract."

What nonsense! What is more quintessentially American than to present a financial claim against the government or some other institution with deep pockets? Americans traditionally demand that the government give them money for services rendered-such as voting for the ruling party-or as compensation for something bad the government did-like failing to warn a drunken man not to urinate on the third rail of a subway (in case you're interested, the electricity passes through the urine stream, gets to the man's organ, and I'll just let the reader imagine the rest). The federal government has a Court of Claims whose whole *purpose* is to hear Americans' financial demands against the federal government. The only reason blacks can't seek reparations for slavery through the Court of Claims is that the filing deadline has expired.

To paraphrase Steve Dallas, the attorney in the old cartoon series "Bloom County:" "America-land of the lawsuit! God bless her!"

Nine
What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?

Horowitz starts off by asserting that "there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians...created one." I used to believe this, but I have been reminded of a guy who fought slavery without being a white Christian. Does the name Moses ring a bell? Hello?

Horowitz points out that the North in the American Civil War and the British Navy's actions against the slave trade helped end slavery. But the American Civil War involved fighting *among* Americans, in response to a problem (slavery) which *all* Americans were responsible for. Why should blacks be grateful to America as a whole because of the actions of *some* Americans from 1861-1865? And why should blacks be grateful *to America* for the anti-slavery activities of the British navy? The United States screamed bloody murder when the British navy searched American ships suspected of carrying slaves. American consuls knowingly issued false American papers to slavers so that they would have the protection of the American flag in doing their dirty work. What "debt" do blacks owe America on account of *British* actions which America denounced, even threatening war if suspected American slavers were hassled by Britain? (Lincoln and the Senate agreed in 1862 to let the British Navy search suspected American slave ships. The Atlantic slave trade suffered a fatal blow).

Horowitz asserts that, had it not been for the Civil War, blacks in America "would *still* be slaves" (emphasis in original). What crystal ball does Horowitz possess that allows him to peer into an alternate universe where the Civil War never happened, and see what the status of slavery in 2001 would be? Most countries that abolished slavery-not to mention many states in the United States-got rid of the institution without war. What would have stopped the United States (or the Confederate States, if they'd won the war) from peacefully ending slavery without war just like other countries and many U. S. states did? Of course, this is all speculative. Without the Civil War, emancipation may have been delayed (in Brazil, it was delayed until 1880, but there wasn't a civil war). But only pure speculation allows anyone to assert that slavery would *still exist* without the Civil War. Are we to say that the half-million casualties of the Civil War were legitimately sacrificed on behalf of Horowitz's speculations?

Horowitz says that American blacks have the world's highest standard of living, compared to other blacks. He attributes this to America's principle of equality. Although it certainly helped black people that there was more entrepreneurial freedom in the United States than elsewhere, the success of America's blacks has nothing to do with what blacks owe America-successful blacks are successful because they (or their ancestors) worked hard to grab a slice of the pie which white people were trying to keep for themselves. American blacks should thank God, not America, for any prosperity they have been able to wring from the sweat of their brows.

Eight
Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid

Horowitz says that reparations have already been paid to black people in the form of affirmative action and welfare benefits. Let's start with affirmative action. Horowitz is the President of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and edits its online magazine *FrontPage.* The *Frontpage* ezine recently ran an essay by Jason Riley, an essay that was originally published in the *Wall Street Journal.* Riley's essay contended that favoritism for black students on college campuses is based on an assumption of black inferiority. Horowitz is comfortable enough with Riley's views to publish those views in *FrontPage.* If, then, Horowitz thinks that affirmative action is based on an assumption of black inferiority, then affirmative action can hardly be considered as beneficial to black people-quite the contrary. From Horowitz's standpoint, therefore, affirmative action can hardly be considered as a legitimate form of reparations to black people. If Horowitz buys Riley's argument, he should try and obtain reparations for black people on account of the harm they suffered due to socially-stigmatizing affirmative action programs.

As to welfare: Linking welfare to black people is an old trick, but the majority of welfare recipients are caucasians. And this only includes welfare for the poor. Welfare for the well-off goes disproportionately to non-blacks, and blacks pay taxes for corporate welfare and similar giveaways. Most fundamentally, welfare was never sold to the public, either under FDR or under LBJ, as a black-oriented reparations program. I don't think Congress would have enacted any welfare bill which was supported with such a rationale. Congress approved welfare as a means of helping poor people of all backgrounds. Anyway, aren't conservatives the people who tell us that welfare hurts the poor by supporting social pathologies, etc? Does Horowitz renounce those conservatives who make such arguments, or does he think that welfare, like affirmative action, harms the recipient? If the latter, then blacks (and whites and other groups) should be seeking reparations based on the harm they suffered from welfare, rather than accepting welfare as a form of reparations.

Seven
The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn African-Americans Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message To The African-American Community.

Finally, Horowitz makes an argument which I agree with. He argues that the reparations movement would lead to a "renewed sense of grievance...[and] a crippling sense of victim-hood" among blacks. In brief, the reparations movement is a distraction from more urgent tasks which people of all races need to work on. All I would add to Horowitz's seventh point is that any serious reparations proposal is bound to be rejected, and this rejection would be interpreted by rabble-rousers as another example of white perfidy, thereby widening the gap between the races.

Six
The Reparations Argument Is Based On The Unfounded Claim That All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From The Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination

Horowitz declares that "the hardships that occurred" under slavery were "overcome" by the effort of individual blacks, and that any economic disadvantage suffered by blacks "is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago." Since the bad effects of slavery have been overcome, no reparations are called for.

This is a colossal exercise in missing the point. Let's assume that Horowitz is right, and that present-day blacks do not suffer from the consequences of slavery. So what? If someone steals $100 from my grandfather, can the thief say to me, "you're a well-off person, and you obviously didn't suffer from the loss of the $100. Therefore I'm keeping the $100 for myself." What absurdity! Theft is theft, and must be repaid, whether the victim suffered from the theft or not. Wrongdoing is wrondgoing, and those who suffer wrongdoing generally deserve to be compensated, even if they managed to efface from their own lives the traces of that wrongdoing. If reparations for blacks were practical (and they are not), then the excuse that "they weren't harmed" won't fly.

Five
The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations Claim Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race Not Injury

Supporters of reparations cite as precedent the German payments to Holocaust survivors, the American payments to those who were interned in World War II for being of Japanese descent, the payments to survivors of the Tuskegee experiment, and so on. Horowitz dismisses these precedents, since the payments in each case were made to "the direct victims of the injustice or their immediate families." Reparations supporters, say Horowitz, want all blacks to get reparations, even though some blacks are descended from free men or even from black slave-owners. By supporting reparations for all blacks, Horowitz says that reparations supporters are racists.

This is true if reparations payments were to be made to *all* blacks. Make the reparations program a little less ambitious, require some kind of proof that the applicant is descended from a slave, and Horowitz's objection will have been overcome. Many black Americans would be able to document their slave descent, sometimes with the use of white people's records. If descendants of slaves, as well as merely "immediate families," could be compensated, we'd have a workable program (if the money were there, which it isn't).

A more modest program of reparations would aim at compensating those whose slave ancestors endured treatment which violated *the positive law existing at the time.* This would allow black people to collect damages if their ancestors were illegally kidnapped into slavery, were returned to slavery under the unconstitutional Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and so on. But if reparations were to be limited in this way, one may ask, why weren't reparations similarly limited in the compensation program for the Japanese internments? The U. S. violated the positive law of the Constitution by rounding up *American citizens* of Japanese descent and banishing them from their homes (this was unconstitutional, even though the Supreme Court called it constitutional). The U. S. also violated the positive law of the Constitution by locking citizens of Japanese descent in internment camps (this was unconstitutional, and the U. S. Supreme Court never expressed an opinion on the matter). Thus, reparations for Japanese-American citizens was appropriate. But what about the internment of Japanese nationals, who were also interned? They were inegible for U. S. citizenship under U. S. law. Bipartisan legislation of unquestioned constitutionality,
dating back to the 1790s, allowed nationals of enemy countries to be detained. Why give compensation for something that was legal? It's time we made reparations for the reparations to the Japanese. With that caveat, reparations would be manageable if only government behavior which was illegal *at the time it happened* could be compensated. Thus, although compensation for slavery itself would not be allowed, compensation for some of slavery's excesses would be all right. But reparations which are limited in the way I have indicated would not be reparations at all.

Four
America Today Is A Multi-Ethnic Nation and Most Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or Indirect) To Slavery

Horowitz thinks it would be wrong to tax immigrants and their descendants-those who came to the U. S. starting in the 1880s and again in the 1960s-on account of slavery practiced before these immigrants arrived. This ignores the fact that the federal government and the various state governments are corporate entities which have had a continuous legal existence for a long and uninterrupted period of time (if we leave out the period 1861-1868 in the case of the former Confederate states). When the government, as a corporate body, commits a wrong, then the government, as a corporate body, must make amends, even if innocent individuals have to pay for it. Let's say I move into a new city. It happens that, some years before I moved to the city, a city policemen killed an innocent citizen. The victims' relatives sued. Shortly after my move to the city, the victims' family wins the case. The city must now pay damages to the family, and as a taxpayer I must bear a share in this expense, although I am completely innocent. I was not in any way responsible for the citizen's death; I never even had a chance to vote against the mayor and City Council who allowed the killing to take place on their watch. Despite my innocence, I must pay for what the city is corporately responsible for.

Three
Only A Tiny Minority Of White Americans Ever Owned Slaves, And Others Gave Their Lives To Free Them

Horowitz notes that only a minority of whites, even in the slaveholding South, owned slaves. He would exonerate all other white people for complicity in slavery. But what about nonslaveholding white voters who voted for pro-slavery candidates? What about whites who joined anti-slave patrols to hunt down fugitives? What about federal marshals who hunted down fugitives in the North? What about Northern "doughfaces" (Northern men with Southern principles) who voted to defend Southern slavery? What about Confederate soldiers who, regardless of their motives, were "objectively" defending slavery (to use the phraseology of Horowitz's former Marxist buddies)?

Horowitz says Union soldiers and their descendants shouldn't have to pay reparations. Horowitz would have us believe that the 350,000 federal troops who died in the Civil War "died to free the slaves." This would have come as a surprise to the Congress of the United States, which on July 22, 1861 passed a "Resolution on the Nature and Object of the War." This resolution (sponsored in the Senate by Tennessee Senator and future President Andrew Johnson) said that "the present deplorable civil war has been forced upon the country by the disunionists of the southern States...this war is not waged...in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those [secessionist] States, but to defend and maintain the *supremacy* of the Constitution [emphasis added], and to preserve the union with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several States unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease." We can readily guess what Congress meant by referring to the "established institutions" of the Confederate states. The only "established institution" which was in question was the institution of slavery. Only five persons voted against this resolution in the Senate, and there were even fewer dissenters in the House.

Of course, as the Civil War progressed (or failed to progress) the North began listening to the abolitionists and attacked the Confederacy by trying to undermine its "peculiar institution." The most famous example of this is Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. It should be remembered that there were *two* emancipation proclamations. Proclamation number one basically told the Confederates, "surrender now or else we'll free your slaves." Proclamation number two basically said, "well, you didn't surrender when we asked you to, so now your slaves are free. But slave states and slave counties which are occupied by Northern troops will get to keep their slaves." The North was forced into abolition by the force of events; they were not acting from any kind of humanitarian motives. No gratitude is called for in response to the North's purely self-interested behavior.

Two
There Is No One Group That Benefited Exclusively From Its Fruits

Horowitz repeats his remarks about black wealth, an issue I have discussed above. "If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves." Actually, slave labor created wealth for those who owned the labor-the masters. Labor by free black people created wealth for the owner of that labor-the free blacks themselves. Unless their masters allowed them to "hire themselves out" (moonlight from their "job" as a slave), slaves didn't get to keep the wealth they produced. That's why free black people tend to be wealthier than enslaved black people. Look it up.

One
There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery

"Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. There were 3,000 black slave-owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?"

Those whose ancestors were enslaved by blacks are just as entitled to reparations as those whose ancestors were enslaved by whites. Arab and African countries which practiced slavery will probably reject reparations for the same reason the United States should reject them-due to cost and other issues I mentioned.

Although Horowitz is right about reparations, his arguments are wrong. His misleading interpretation of history and his use of dubious logic will add fuel to the pro-reparations people, because if Horowitz's arguments are the best that can be said against reparations, maybe reparations aren't such a bad idea after all. But I repeat-reparations are wrong due to the cost, the distraction from issues of present-day slavery, and the impact of reparations claims on race relations. This doesn't mean, however, that we must deny the *moral* debt which the federal and state governments owe to the descendants of slaves.