Renewable Reparations

Great Debates
101

I am not touching the idea of reparations; that is an entirely different issue from this specific plan as presented here. The problem is that it simply doesn’t make fundamental sense as a program. And the attempts to buttress it actually make things worse. This plan is not only a disaster it’s an entirely foreseeable disaster.

First, to explain something which will be important in a sec, the government didn’t just give away homesteading land out of the sheer goodness of Uncle Sam’s heart. There were idealistic motives involved, of course, but the basic issue was that there were lots of potential farmers who needed land and, who, crucially, had some of the capital available to do so - just not necessarily financial capital. They could get a little money, but also tools, seeds, and often they brought a family along to support and to be supported by in turn. They brought with them the human capital skills necessary to make a go of it. Yes, I am obviously talking about the male settlers here but they would be the critical farm laborers in the main and would have to improve the land*.

This was important because it gave the government an indirect return. American settlers would pay American taxes and sell their farm produce which inherently earned foreign exchange and fed the growing cities. It increased the demand for American-made manufactured goods, stimulated rail construction and use, and in a hundred other ways offered a huge boon. The land was essentially valuable in a way that specifically worked in context. And homesteading is still possible today; it’s just no longer desirable. That land that remains isn’t valuable for the purpose. The land that was used and remains in use was the specific locations and regions that were valuable.

*Arguments about Environmentalism or the role and feelings of the American Indian should be left for another day, worthy though they may be.

The problem here is that he government would have to find ways to put ALL the ingredients for effectively no return. The homesteaders, in this plan, must have everything provided to them because there really isn’t a living there. The government is going to provide the land, the solar construction, the skills, and all the infrastructure. There are many African-Americans with solar-related skills because it’s a growing sector, but we don’t have a specific reason to think those skills would be available in the specific individuals you want to aid.

Additionally, if we want the solar power, it makes sense to just invest in that sector. Building and maintaining solar sites is probably a mediocre investment. I do not mean that it is a bad investment or I would have said that. I said mediocre: not necessarily better than the alternatives. THis does mean, however, that there’s room to develop it with additional capital since it is not clearly a bad investment. It is a growing sector, although it may be labor-intensive compared to fossil-fuels (which is not necessarily a good thing but that’s a long side question).

But that begs the question of why we would adopt this plan specifically. There’s no specific resource we need to unlock in this case, and the human factor is huge an daunting. There are so many questionable assumptions here, including the ludicrous throw-away-line of “I intend to build state of the art teaching hospitals right next to each of these homesteads to attract non-racist doctors.” That alone is a massive, many-billions-of-dollar undertaking which would stretch the administrative capacity of the federal government, and it would be a trivial task compared to the proposed plan. You are planning to employ a non-trivial fraction of the American population in this scheme. You probably need to consider a way for it to be fundamentally viable.

In addition, it betrays a really weird misunderstanding of how solar farms work. They are fairly substantial, of course, and do require maintenance. But they don’t have massive housing complexes filled with on-site workers. Saying you’ll build all these teaching hospitals next door makes as much sense as saying you’ll build five teaching hospitals in Granger County, Tennessee - which is in quite a beautiful spot and produce the best tomatoes on Earth, but also can’t realistically support that kind of medical infrastructure.

Now, you didn’t ask this of me, damuriajashi, so you absolutely have no obligation to respond, but when you say things like, “…for the sake of argument, lets assume all your practical concerns are overcome.” then I don’t see how anyone could take it seriously.

102

Now, on a more realistic basis - if this is a roundabout way of wanting to strengthen communities by investing education… why would we not do that thing? It is not easy, of course, and I have a great many criticisms of the American education system. Nonetheless, that would make a heck of a lot more sense than trying to do the OP’s plan. However, throwing wads of cash from helicopters across the country makes more sense, so that is not a high bar to clear.

103

Except the thread title is about reparations. But I get your point, you want to address criticisms of the plan itself independent of any issues of the idea of reparations or of this is a valid way to pay. Fair enough to limit the scope of your criticism.

104

How is what you said different from what i said except you call it directly saving lives by avoiding an economic collapse and i call it indirect.

And yes insurance is frequently tied to jobs. We also have obamacare and medicaid. But it is not a direct saving of lived to provide stimulus so that small businesses will not collapse and people will not lose their jobs and therefore become uninsured and maybe they get sick and die. There are several events that need to occur between the money being spent and the person dying. I don’t see how you call that direct, it’s like several steps removed.

I’m in favor of more stimulus but not because people are dying without it. There is a tipping point of economic catastrophe from which the economy does not easily recover. I only wish more people understood that when Obama was trying to fix the economy.

105

That’s what the training is for

I don’t care about solar power, I just want vehicle to convert unused land into income that will still be viable in 25 years.

106

This is entirely about reparations. Without that underlying policy rationale, why the fuck would we spend so much money doing something the private sector is doing already?

Why would we want to invest so much money into something the private sector is already doing?

As a vehicle for reparations

I agree it was ridiculous and only put there to try and get past the nitpicking objections that could only be addressed with a fully developed plan and feasibility study. As for cost, we just spent 2 trillion dollars fighting this pandemic and we are looking to spend 2-3 trillion dollars more. Most of that money was spent to buoy an economy being crippled by bad national response to Covi 19 abnd bad pandemic policymaking at the national level. We are simply paying a shit ton of money so that we don’t suffer the economic effects of trump’s stupidity. It seems to me that we deserve whatever the fuck trump’s presidency does to us, we brought that upon ourselves. Elections have consequences. In this case it is 5 trillion dollars of debt.

Would this plan cost more than 5 trillion dollars to implement? Because I think that if we are willing to spend 5 trillion dollars to buoy the damage from a series of unforced errors by this administration, we should be willing to spend at least as much try and remove the stain of slavery and segregation, it won’t erase it entirely but it will get the big crusty chunks off the surface, but some of that stain has leeched deep into the grain of our society and we will simply have to proceed as if it isn’t there and hope that time and nature weathers it away.

107

Are you under the impression that we haven’t tried to improve education for these communities? We have been unsuccessful in finding that silver bullet. Attempts at reform are often met with hostility (see Michelle Rhee), the ability of education bureaucracies and unions to absorb money without improvement seems limitless.
I am trying to tie reparations to something that would create transformative change in black america.
I think dropping money from helicopters would result in little to no long term improvement for the black community. But I would be willing to try a UBI for the descendants of slaves and american indians.

108

I agree that we owe big time, and also that we cannot pay it off. I understand your comparison to bailouts and economic hits to the government to avoid worse problems with industries folding.

Here is my problem: we cannot pay what is owed. There’s no way to even tally that up. But you are proposing “pennies on the dollar” and thereby declaring the debt paid. This will not have the effect of making white people respect black people more. Instead, it will reinforce their sense of entitlement - “Hey, we paid reparations, now you want more? You just take, take, take. Greedy worthless @$!#. We don’t owe you nothin’ any more, so shut up.”

What we can do and what I would like to see is do is address the impacts of slavery that still exist. That includes systemic racism in our justice system, wealth imbalance, cycle of poverty by unofficial segregation in housing, lending programs, community building aimed at low income sectors - especially black ones. Whatever we can think of that changes the future possibilities for the disadvantaged. Doing that will necessarily help more black people.

You argue that won’t change the percentages, but if the programs and incentives are specifically encouraged for black communities, then it will.

I’m not averse to racially discerning programs to address racial injustice. But I think the programs need to make sense, and be something the people actually want.

109

White people don’t respect anyone but white people.
But there is a gap between how they treat asians/jews and blacks.
I think a lot of this is rich white people looking down on poor black people and assuming that they are rich because they are hardworking and moral while black people are poor because they are lazy and immoral. They hate jews and asians for different reasons and want to take us down a peg and resent that we are outperforming them in a system designed to make success for non-white groups virtually impossible. In some ways an economically independent fina ncially stable black commuity will increase the hatred that white people will have for black people but it will reduce the disrespect and condescension from white people.

This is all sounds nice, but very amorphous. Give me specific things you would do to address the impacts of slavery. Are you seriously suggesting we break up black neighborhoods and sprinkle the black people like pixiedust throughout the white neighborhoods? To what end?

In what way are programs specifically targetted at black neighborhoods going to change their…

How about a UBI for the descendants of slaves for the next 350 years?

110

Here’s my problem with most government programs aimed at helping black communities. Its white supremacy in another form. White saviors coming to the rescue acting like they’re doing black people a favor. It provides little permanent change, and no dignity, it mostly just alleviates white guilt.

It’s kind of like if I came along, broke into your house, kicked you out, raped your wife, sold your kids to strangers, beat you and made you live in a tent in the back yard. Then some of my great-grandchildren feeling bad about how things went down come along and offer to help with school supplies and groceries and get your great grandkids into good schools (mostly at the expense of kids other than my own great grandkid’s children). Those great grandchildren are doing nothing to correct the injustice, they just want to stop feeling guilty about all the shit they have but know don’t deserve. I suppose it’s better than the great grandkids that are perfectly fine with the situation and think those bums camping out in the back yard are leeches who are only stuck camping out in someone’s back yard because of high illegitimacy rates.

111

Skin needs to be in the game for them to realize that the help they would be getting also relies heavily on them helping themselves.

And also to eliminate this type of uncle daddy thing with the “good” white folks handing the “poor” black folks a better life. As if it was a gift to be given.

A better life absolutely has to be earned or it means little.

112

I’m sorry my point got lost, I was attempting to separate the act of shutting down from the economic protection elements. I call it directly saving lives to shut down. The economic protection elements are indirect, but people being required to stay home and bars and clubs and restaurants and malls and office buildings and hotels and theme parks et al being closed was all about limiting transfer of disease. The shut down was directly saving lives.

113

This part I agree with.

No, and that’s a preposterous interpretation of what I said. Elimination of real estate redlining and preventing blacks from moving in to wealthy neighborhoods is the kind of thing I was speaking of.

114

Didn’t you just say

Bolding added. And Kearsen1 makes a good point. I know that idea is at least trying to approach the scale of the debt, but it would be a hard sell. It’s too easy to perceive it as another government handout that does nothing to incentive blacks to put in effort to improve their situation. It feeds the stereotype that blacks are just lazy bums, welfare queens, etc. The perception will be they will think, “Why do I need to work, I’ve got the UBI?”, not “I’ve got the UBI, how do I use it to make a better life for my kids?”

115

You should research the Homestead Acts. Blacks could completely take advantage of them.

116

From what I read, the homestead act was open to blacks in theory but not in practice. This is why there were so few black homesteads.

117

There were a few thousand homestead. What barriers were put into place to Blacks making homestead claims?

118

This was mentioned upthread, but between the years of 1862 and 1868, Black people were not citizens of the United States and were therefore ineligible for homesteads. This may not have been mentioned yet, but the majority of homestead claims were granted during the height of Jim Crow. (source)

~Max

119

Out of millions of homesteads.

What barriers were put in place? Regardless of how you feel about the existence of institutional racism in 2020, institutional racism was pretty obvious in the 1800’s and early 1900’s.

120

Simply not true. The Homestead Act of 1863 allowed free-Blacks to homestead.

Doesn’t address my point. How were eligible Blacks prevented from homesteading? You made the claim they were so how was it done? Denying their claims? Stealing their property? Literacy test? If a free Black man filed a homestead claim in 1864, what would be done to deny it?