On Reparations and Ending Inherited Wealth.

If you’re a normal person, you probably think you’ll get stuff from your parents when you die. Sorry to bring that up. Regardless, I want the good family fondue pot. But why is anybody entitled to get money or cars or a house from their dead relatives? My answer is that they are not (save maybe for some minor exceptions like the fondue pot).

Nobody believes you are entitled to wealth that you didn’t work for. If we really do believe it’s self-evident that “all men are created equal” how can we justify a huge payout to some lucky trust-fund baby?

That’s where reparations — payments to the descendants of slaves — comes in. Critics of reparations love to ask inane questions about how exactly we would calculate who has suffered the most as a result of slavery. A better question is: how is it possible that anyone has an unequal share of dead people’s wealth? Inherited wealth is the main, maybe the only, way that today’s generation of whites directly inherits physical wealth that was beaten out of and extracted from slaves. But the United States has a legal code designed to transfer unearned wealth to undeserving kids through wills and trusts.

Imagine you have two sets of children. One set of kids are the descendants of former white slavers. The other set of kids are the descendants of former slaves. Who is more likely to own property that used to be a family cotton plantation? Of course, the heirs of white slavers are more likely to have inherited a plantation. Hopefully you see that as fundamentally unjust.

The principle doesn’t only apply to the descendants of southern plantation owners. After all, George Bush and Donald Trump both bankrupted a few companies (and the United States) and are somehow still obscenely wealthy.

But instead of allowing the opponents of reparations to nitpick, we should demand that all family wealth ends with our generation. All the wealth Southern families, or any of the wealth that other families over on Melody Lane, ever generated should be liquidated, put into a general fund, and equitably distributed to the next generation of children including in the form of reparations.

Except the fondue pot.