California's Reparations Conundrum

The state of California and some of its municipal subdivisions currently contemplate paying reparations to their Black residents. This reparations measure is not for chattel slavery per se, as slavery was historically illegal in California dating to its admission to the union in 1850. Rather, it is a supposed recompense for creating slavery-like conditions that activists ascribe to under-elaborated injustices of California’s past. It is reparations for repression, in other words. 

The sums being discussed, $5 million per person in the case of San Fran and half a million per person by the state’s reparations task force, are as budget-busting as they are eye-popping. The state’s estimate alone comes out to $500 billion if only 1 million of California’s 2.25 million Black residents are found eligible.

For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that the repression claims are true and the sums suggested are just. Let’s also stipulate that California can fairly discern eligibility reasonably well at reasonable cost. That still leaves the huge question of who should pay the big bill?

Certainly not current taxpayers, who had no control over the racial injustices of California’s past. Moreover, because cash is fungible, any federal grants to California and its guilty subdivisions would risk exposing the taxpayers of other states to a liability for any reparations program. As a practical matter, California’s proposed reparations scheme could not be implemented without unfairly confiscating tax dollars from potentially tens of millions of people who played no part in the state’s alleged wrongs.

But it is also not clear that current California taxpayers should have to pay for reparations either, through any combination of increased taxation or decreased government services. They did not create the repressive laws and policies and many opposed them, to no avail.

Besides, two wrongs do not make a right. Who’s to say that in a generation California taxpayers won’t legitimately claim to have suffered repression by being forced to pay for sins they did not commit? Moreover, given California’s admission of its own guilt in the enacting of a reparations program, who could trust it to administer such a large transfer of wealth?

That leaves three sources of funds: the guilty governments themselves, the political parties in power, and the politicians and bureaucrats who voted for and oversaw the harmful laws, and the judges who failed to overturn them.

Forget the third option as individual policymakers are well shielded legally. Individuals could also claim that they were just following orders from their parties or their bosses, which holds up better in civil than criminal cases.

If political parties were held solely accountable, they would have to claim bankruptcy and fold because donors would disappear and they would not have sufficient assets to cover the costs. So score one for making the political parties culpable.

If the state government itself is to pay, it does own assets like roads, parks, buildings, and the like, that could be sold to the highest bidders. Unfortunately, though, California’s most recent estimate of its capital assets (p. 44 of its 2020 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report) reports a mere $137 billion.

Perhaps if culpable cities pitched in all their assets, too, enough could be raised but California and its major municipalities all have other creditors whose interests would obviously be adversely impacted by such a drastic move. And, again, two wrongs don’t make a right.

The only real remedy, it seems, is to declare California a failed state, make it a territory, and allow it, or parts of it, back into the Union after it ratifies a constitution that ensures its people a republican form of government, incapable, by design, of ever inflicting such damage on anyone ever again.