White People Stink

And Amerika, being majority white, stinks even worse. Welcome to what reparations is really about.

A few days ago, a California commission appointed by Gov. Newsom approved a reparations plan that according to this NBC report, would cost the state the better part of a trillion dollars:

It could cost California more than $800 billion to compensate Black residents for generations of overpolicing, disproportionate incarceration and housing discrimination, economists have told a state panel considering reparations.

The preliminary estimate is more than 2.5 times California’s $300 billion annual budget and does not include a recommended $1 million per older Black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span.

Of course the price tag for this program is certain to be higher, as government programs inevitably cost more, and often much more, than the early estimates given for them.

You will not be surprised to learn, then, that the Commission that put this plan forward had zero in specifics about how it would be paid for. This is not merely because it can’t be paid for by any plan short of the one you’d concoct while on LSD. It’s because even LSD won’t do the trick.

Still, the fantasyland cost is not the main problem here. Neither are the numerous questions about who exactly would be eligible for payments and who exactly would be legally obliged to foot the bill for them (white people who came to the country last month? Last year? Two years ago? Whites who’ve been in the workforce for three weeks? Whites descended from one of the approximately 360,000 Union soldiers who died in the cause of ending slavery?).

No, the main problem with the reparations scheme is that it’s evil. It would point the finger of guilt and punish millions of people who had nothing to do with slavery and would have tried to end it if they had a time machine. Its grotesque injustice would inject not less but more — massively more — race-laden resentment into American life than we’ve ever had. It’s the empty-your-pockets end product of the Left’s central, sick worldview that the United States is a blight on the planet, a cesspool of racism and cruelty built yesterday, today and tomorrow on the backs of the oppressed.

This is not something that’s debatable any more than any other cult belief is debatable. You can’t “follow the science” and come up with a conclusion anything like it. There’s a reason black people and other “people of color” from every corner of the world are falling over themselves to come to the United States, but that reason is of no interest to the Amerika Stinks crowd. Our country’s indecency is an article of faith with them and — oddly I say this sincerely — only coincidentally a scam to pry money away from people who worked for it to hand over to people who didn’t (not the least numerous of whom will be — you’d never guess! — the green-eyed crackpots who hatched this scheme).

The bright side of all this is that reparations, and specifically the fact that it’s a brainchild exclusively of the Democratic ruling class, is, politically, a gift from heaven. According to Gallup, Americans oppose reparations by better than two-to-one. Republicans and Independents oppose it by big margins and rank-and-file Democrats are split down the middle.

On the merits, and I use that word advisedly, I find it impossible even to start. Again, this is because we’re not talking about the “merits” in any normal sense, and instead are talking about a mindset that isn’t amenable to discussion or evidence. But one way to at least have a glance into reparations’ intellectual incoherence is to take note of some of the items we’re supposed to pay reparations for. Take, for example, “overpolicing” and “disproportionate incarceration.”

That complaint is, in a word, nuts. Again according to Gallup, more than 80% of black citizens want the same amount of policing they’re getting or more, while only 19% want less. This only makes sense, because people free from Woke delusion understand that blacks are disproportionately crime victims (mostly of other blacks), and hence disproportionately benefit from the police presence that tends to suppress crime.

Largely the same reasoning applies to the charge of mass incarceration. Since incarceration incapacitates criminals from doing their thing in civil society, the more of them we have in prison, the better off civil society is going to be — and in particular the segment of civil society that (unlike the Wokesters in the Hollywood Hills and Scarsdale and Bethesda) can’t afford gated communities and private security and has to depend for protection on the public criminal justice system.

The benefit of incarcerating hoodlums is not just a guess. It’s well documented. For example, in the 20 years between 1990 and 2010, while the prison population was growing substantially, the crime rate was in sharp decline, see this chart. It’s of course true that incarcerating black criminals is unpopular with those criminals and the people who support them, but among the great run of black people — who are not criminals, don’t want their kids to be criminals, and want simply to live in peace and safety — the benefits of increased incarceration can literally be measured in the lives that were not lost, family members who did not become addicts, and property that was not stolen.

The moral and political case against reparations, together with the fact that the enthusiasm for them rests solely in the Democratic Party, leads me to view this as an issue the Republicans should put front and center next year. Make Joe Biden take a stand. Specifically, the Republican candidate should announce that he opposes reparations in any form and under any guise, and will not appoint any “reparations commission” to normalize the idea (which is the real reason these commissions exist). He should then challenge Biden to join him.

This time, it won’t be just encroaching senility that gets Joe tongue-tied.