Slavery and Collective Guilt

Much has been said about the role of slavery in the history of the United States, and while that history cannot be recounted in a brief article, it is important to clarify some of the ethical principles underpinning the institution of slavery in light of contemporary debates about reparations for slavery. A number of states have expressed an intention to pay slavery reparations. For example, the New York Times reports that,

Almost 200 years after slavery officially ended in New York, the City Council passed legislation Thursday authorizing a commission to study the devastating effects of human bondage and to develop a plan to make reparations for the harms caused.

In these debates, rather than confine ourselves to considering whether the states generously offering to pay reparations can even afford it—as the reparations bill from California alone is said to amount to $800 billion—it is also important to address the underlying ethical concerns.

Unethical and immoral

From a Rothbardian perspective, the reason why slavery is wrong is that it violates the principle of self-ownership. Self-ownership is a natural right vested in all human beings, from which it follows that no man can own another. In the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard cites with approval the following quote from William Lloyd Garrison:

The right to enjoy liberty is inalienable…. Every man has a right to his own body—to the products of his own labor—to the protection of law…. That all these laws which are now in force, admitting the right of slavery, are, therefore, before God, utterly null and void…and therefore they ought instantly to be abrogated.

From the perspective of Roman law, Edgar Shumway explains that slavery was a legal institution founded in both the law of persons and the law of property: the slave was,

…an object of property and possession, alienable like other property…but the fact that the slave was a human being differentiated him from other objects of property, and assimilated his position in certain important respects to that of a descendant under parental power.

Clearly, examined in light of Rothbard’s principles of ethics, Roman law on this point is unethical and immoral. But it is one thing to pronounce that historic legal codes were “ethically unsatisfactory,” as Shumway puts it, and quite another to assert that something ought now to be done to cure and redress the historic wrong. This is where the “reparations” activists go astray.

Collective guilt

We can recognize that it was wrong for African slave-traders to round up their own kin and sell them into slavery, but does it follow that we should now demand that modern African states like Nigeria must atone for those historic crimes? Similarly, it was wrong for Arab pirates to raid the British Isles for centuries, seizing English, Cornish, and Irish people from their homes and selling them in North African slave markets, but does this mean modern North African states like Algeria and Tunisia should pay reparations to the UK?

As an ethical matter, the claim that people today should pay for historic crimes overlooks the basic moral principle that punishment for a crime can only be meted out upon the criminal himself, not upon his descendants. As David Gordon reminds us, “moral responsibility is individual rather than collective.”

In addition, utilitarian considerations may arise as to the feasibility of correcting historic wrongs by levying financial penalties on today’s taxpayers. Would taxpayers be asked to recompense all historic wrongs that have ever occurred in the history of the country? If not, how would it be decided which historical wrongs “deserve” reparations and which ones do not? Walter E. Williams pointed out that, “In addition to black Americans, the Irish, Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Poles, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, and most other ethnic groups have shared the experience of being discriminated against by one means or another.” To that we could add the experience of the South under Reconstruction. Lew Rockwell explains that, “After the War Between the States, the Union’s ‘Reconstruction’ tyrannized the South”—a grave injustice for which no restitution is being offered. No principled argument has been presented by reparations claimants as to why some ethnic groups deserve reparations but not others.

On the ethical question, one view sometimes put forward is that slavery is the “worst” historic injustice and, therefore, distinguishable from all other historic injustices. This is not a principled view, as slavery is not worse than murder—should victims of murder, regardless of their race, then not be entitled to reparations above victims of slavery?

Some people have tried to construct a hierarchy of evil based for example on the numbers who were victims of the crime or the longer-lasting legacies such as income and wealth gaps between different groups today. The problem with all these victimology measures of “who suffered the most” is that suffering is subjective and all comparisons of whose suffering was “worst” have no principled foundation. An ethical position should be based on sound moral principles, not by attempting to evaluate who suffered the “worst.”

Laurence Thomas’s analysis of “The Morally Obnoxious Comparisons of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust” illustrates what happens when such an attempt is made—all groups feel that the historic evil their group suffered has been belittled and derided. Rather than yielding a clear “winner” of the victimology stakes, it only serves to mire all groups even deeper in their own sense of grievance.

For these reasons, Murray Rothbard rejected the entire notion of collective guilt. In his essay “Guilt Sanctified,” he argued:

Now, the entire culture is characterized by massive collective guilt, and if anyone fails to give due public lip-service to a long list of solemnly avowed guilts, he is literally driven from public life. Guilt is everywhere, all-pervasive, and brought to us by the same scoundrels who once promised us easy liberation. A brief rundown: guilt for centuries of slavery, guilt for the oppression and rape of women, guilt for the Holocaust, guilt for the existence of the handicapped, guilt for eating and killing animals, guilt for being fat, guilt for not recycling your garbage, guilt for “desecrating the Earth.”

Rather than trying to assess who deserves money from taxpayers for their historic grievances and how much they should be paid, we should reject the entire premise and guard against falling into the traps of collective guilt and collective punishment.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

zerohedge
Economics , News , Politics , Science
December 7, 2024
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The Miserable Cost Of An Open Border

Authored by Seth Barron via RealClearPolitics,

The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

“Line In The Sand,” the resulting documentary, is a remarkable and humane exposition, revealing perspectives and images American audiences have mostly been prevented from seeing. O’Keefe and his intrepid team begin on the U.S. side of the Mexican border, where we witness migrants crossing the border through holes that their guides have cut in a fence that serves as a target as much as a barrier. Infrared cameras show dozens of illegal aliens streaming toward “pick-up” vehicles on the U.S. side while smugglers – presumably cartel members – a few feet away taunt O’Keefe and his group. “What if I were to run up to them right now, what would happen?” O’Keefe asks his guide. “I would highly advise you against that,” he is told, in a classic understatement.

The fact that coyotes and other human traffickers are paid to assist northbound migrants with their passage is no scandal; we all know what their motivations are and why they are doing what they do. But O’Keefe documents multiple examples of U.S. Border Patrol agents standing idly by while illegal aliens cross, virtually under their noses. “Why aren’t you doing anything?” he asks. “Have a good day, guys,” a border agent desultorily responds before driving off in the general direction of the episode. Later, a migrant stands in front of a Border Patrol truck, clearly trying to alert the agents of his intention to surrender, but is studiously ignored until O’Keefe and his team call their attention to him.

There is a kind of sad comedy in the operations of U.S. border security, and O’Keefe is not unsympathetic to the absurd position that border agents have been put in. Trained to defend the national border and to serve as the first line of defense of American soil, these agents have been recommissioned as a perverse Welcome Wagon for illegal aliens, charged with making their undocumented and uninvited entrance to the United States as commodious as possible.

Looking to get deeper into the heart of this migratory avalanche, O’Keefe went deep into Mexico, to the city of Irapuato, about 150 miles northwest of Mexico City. Irapuato is a popular railway junction where thousands of migrants climb aboard “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” a cargo train that chugs northward toward the United States. In the film’s most remarkable footage, O’Keefe and his team join with migrants, mostly from South and Central America, to ride The Beast, also known as “el Tren del Muerto,” or the Train of Death. O’Keefe talks to the migrants without condescension, asking them their destinations and what they plan to do when they get there, and their concerns about the perilous nature of the journey. We see the film crew race to jump on a moving train and clamber on top to sit in a pile of coal; O’Keefe is shocked at how truly dangerous this small element of the trip is and sympathizes with the migrants’ difficult choices. These scenes are among the film’s most affecting, along with the crew’s random encounter with a little girl who had just crossed the border after journeying from Guatemala by herself. There is a human dimension to illegal immigration, and O’Keefe does not ignore it.

However, there is also an impersonal dimension to this massive population transfer, and O’Keefe determinedly aims to uncover it – to put a face to the institutions and administrators that benefit from the rough injection of millions of people into American society. From government agents to bus companies to nonprofit resettlement groups to private contractors running huge, walled compounds housing thousands of children, O’Keefe doggedly tries to penetrate the mechanics of a system that resolutely hides itself behind a screen of silence, usually in the name of “safety” and “privacy.”

Some of the film’s more comical moments pertain to these segments, such as when the team follows some just-arrived Chinese migrants in San Diego to an employment agency, where other Chinese aliens, already in the country for several months, complain that it’s much harder to live in the United States than they had imagined. O’Keefe tries to sniff out a connection between the owner of the agency and more powerful actors, but it emerges that there really isn’t much going on; in fact, the owner asks O’Keefe if he knows of a way to apply for government grants.

Elsewhere, O’Keefe tries to get information about the operations of several huge residential centers for unaccompanied minors and tries to spin their refusal to give him access to the centers or submit to interviews as evidence of the existence of vast, government-funded child sex trafficking networks. But it seems more likely, though no less troubling, that the open borders policy of the last four years has created a tremendous humanitarian crisis of alien children roaming the continent by themselves, and the government is probably trying to keep them from becoming prey to sex traffickers while they sort out where to send them. Though O’Keefe does not uncover a salacious network of child predators, his vigorous pursuit of the truth does reveal the existence of a large, shadowy, government-funded, and lucrative system of child “welfare.”

So, “Line In The Sand” is correct in the larger sense that billions of dollars are being spent managing this human flow, and many people are getting rich off of it. The last thing these parasitical administrators of the nonprofit industrial complex want is for the border to close. O’Keefe does a great job of capturing in real time the corruption of a local New York City nonprofit called La Jornada, whose leader, Pedro Rodriguez, evidently perpetrates fraud, demanding fees for services that the city provides for free. O’Keefe also sends a Spanish-speaking reporter undercover into the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City’s main processing center for newly-arrived migrants, which offers him free housing, medical care, and even airplane tickets, even though the reporter explains that he has no identification of any sort. How, O’Keefe asks, in our post 9/11 security-obsessed era, are we to make sense of a system that admits millions of unvetted foreigners into the country, and then offers to fly them anywhere they care to go?

“Line In The Sand” is rough in parts, but intentionally so. Its subject is so sprawling and tangled that a neat and clean representation would be a lie. Even with a nine-figure budget – which this film assuredly did not have – a documentary about the border and the 30 million-footed human swarm that has crossed it would be messy and incomplete. But James O’Keefe and his small team have done something remarkable. They have taken on the decade’s biggest story, given it form, and preserved the humanity of its subjects. It is worth watching.

Seth Barron is a writer in New York and author of the forthcoming “Weaponized from Humanix.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/07/2024 – 17:30