And yet...America was built with substantial help from slave labor. Labor that people were transported from Africa to give to us, against their will. Seems to me like a simple debt that's yet to be repaid. You don't get to keep stolen goods just because it was your grandpa who received them.

And yet...As much as I see a moral imperative to reparations, what's required to make it happen is morally repulsive. Because the color of one's skin is not sufficient, it's ancestry that's at issue. First, proving that one had an ancestor who was a slave; then how many; and ultimately, what percentage of each person is of slavish extraction.

I know, ER, that you know history quite well enough to remember that vile old regime that had a vast bureaucracy to determine what percentage of a person's "blood" was Aryan...or Jewish. How would we pay reparations without following the Nazis down the beginning of that slippery slope to hell?

Wouldn't the white supremacists just love the idea of getting a certificate from the government that their "blood" is 100% European? Because that's also implicit in the existence of such a bureaucracy. They couldn't turn away anyone who applies for reparations, especially just because their skin's "too light". So the government would be compelled to perform a DNA analysis and genealogical research to produce a verdict that racists could brandish as a badge of honor (at least, assuming no surprises in the woodshed...[but the monetary reward for a surprise makes it a win-win]).

And oh by the way, then the government would have a database of the DNA of millions of Americans. Law enforcement is already mining private DNA testing companies for evidence. Imagine cops mining a central federal DNA database.

And yet...if the real-world moral downside didn't outweigh the upside so badly, I'd be for reparations. The argument about fairness to individual white people is about as specious as the one about fairness of school taxes to non-parents. We're all liable for the obligations of our society. No man is an island. Ayn Rand was a sociopathic monster. So was Maggie Thatcher, and there is too such a thing as "society".