The Reparation Issue
Since the early formation of our nation the United States has struggled endlessly with prejudicial issues regarding race, religion, and culture—plus has been seeped with a tendency to violence as means to achieve personal or national goals. The sad fact is that only during 21 years of our existence has the U.S. not waged any wars somewhere. It is not so much that many other nations do not match or exceed us with these tendencies, but we deceive ourselves to thinking we are not really that way at all. President Bush liked to refer to our soldiers as “peace keepers”. How many would care to take a vacation trip to any of the countries we have waged military adventures in the last 50 years? Not much peace or prosperity to be found. Our military adventures certainly have not created peace and prosperity in any of the countries with who we have engaged in military actions since World War II, with the possible exception of Vietnam and they won. The financial cost of these failures has been huge.
At the onset of our created ‘democratic government’, only land owning Protestants were included in some of the ‘rights’ guaranteed by the constitution. Slowly, over the years, more and more of our citizens got more and more individual rights except blacks who, shortly before the Civil War, were declared by the Supreme Court to not even be citizens, but owned property. It doesn’t help much to overdo placing blame. Human nature is determined by the evolutionary process, not some kind of perceived devils, evil spirits, evil religions, political nature of a government, etc. Abstractly, most of our citizens admit all citizens should be treated via the Golden Rule—the real innate ethical basis for human behavior—but self serving desires of varying intensities often override any ethical behavior. It is what it is. Still, enough people made enough efforts so that, over time, more and more groups got their civil rights. Evolution works slowly.
No one can seriously argue that some groups in this country, sometimes, in some places, did not, or still do not, get the same civil rights as others were or are receiving. Environmental circumstances, created by our society, limited any prospects for many individuals to prosper. Basically, we need remember that the environment of the formative years for all children matters. It really does. Without the proper environment the nervous system—especially, does not develop the potential a child has genetically, and sometimes the damage is permanent. The reality is simply this: Many children raised in our current urban, suburban, and rural ghettoes end up permanently damaged by their environment and will never be responsible, productive members of our society. The extent of the damage to the developing nervous systems will vary and some children, via the efforts of others, will escape relatively undamaged. What is for sure is the sad situation that so many young children are at the mercy of a roll of the dice.
It is not the intent here, to delve too deeply into the science involved here, but to start with an understanding of our current circumstances in order to better understand how best to make the best of a bad situation.
Currently some politicians have suggested that, in this case, blacks should be given monetary compensation for the injustices of the past. This sounds much like the days when we used Affirmative Action as an attempt to level the playing field for blacks, other minorities, and women. This good intentioned effort did precious little to change the situations for those most in need of help, and managed to anger many citizens who saw many people, not in need of any help, get favored treatment for jobs, salary increases, etc. Instead of saying that those in greatest need of help, regardless of race or gender, would get the boost, those blacks, other minorities, and women least in need of any help got almost all the the help. In other words, for example, those blacks living in middle class or real affluent neighborhoods, going to good schools suddenly found themselves entitled to go to Harvard, be first in line for the best jobs/promotions, etc. Those blacks living in urban, suburban, or rural ghettoes rarely saw much, if any, change in their lives, and for good reason. Many were permanently damaged goods with learning disabilities, memory problems, personality quirks, attitude problems, and many physical problems also associated with nervous system damage like being overweight, increased likelihood of diabetes, emotional problems, and the list goes on. They simply were not equipped to be a productive successful citizen in our modern society or any other society—not because of their genes, but because the environments they grew up in were grossly deficient. We could give every black citizen a thousand dollars and claim we have righted the ship and this would be ridiculous. Six months later absolutely nothing will have changed except the rest of the public been forced to pay for such nonsense. It would be like an individual, feeling sorry for some ghetto child in a store, giving the child an ice cream cone, or giving a poor family a meal on Thanksgiving, and thinking they have accomplished something other than a temporary piece of mind for themselves.
Here is the reality: Until all children have a decent environment for their formative years, the societal problems here will get worse, not better. That means all children need have good schools, good teachers, safe environments, good diets, good medical care, good parenting, good job opportunities, so that their nervous systems will develop properly and enable their genetic potentials to flourish. There is no other solution. Period. So where does the money come from for all this? That answer is simple. As long as government allows 2-5% of our citizens to own 90 percent of our nations wealth, and 3 citizens to own as much of our nation’s wealth as the bottom 50% of our citizens, then nothing can be done.
Good government means the maximum number of citizens receive the maximum amount of contentment in their lives. To the extent any form of government achieves this, it is good government. The 2-5% of our citizens have all this wealth simply because the government allows all the tax breaks, tax cuts, tax shelters, tax deferments etc. to exist so that those with plenty of money have a greased pathway to accumulate more wealth at an exponential rate. The wealthy didn’t disappear back in the days of Eisenhower when the wealthy had a 90% tax rate and steep inheritance taxes. In fact after such taxes were imposed by Teddy Roosevelt, all economic classes benefitted. They were the best of times for all economic groups.
Reparations is a total waste of money. What the disadvantaged need in our country is a level playing field. A level playing field means that all citizens need good health care, good job opportunities, living wages for a full time job, good schools, good teachers, good parenting, safe environments, good police departments freed of rogue prejudiced policemen, a fair judicial system, etc. (I probably left out some things).We can afford all this since we know where most of our wealth is squirreled away. There is nothing wrong and everything right about putting limits on how much of a nations wealth can be grabbed by the wealthy. Enough is enough applies to most materialistic greeds common to our species. The simplest human job task deserves a living wage. There need to be limits on just how much a CEO can be paid relative to the pay given to his/her workers. Currently, the average CEO makes 287 times more than their workers. What is the common sense or ethical basis for this? Aaron Rodgers makes 34 times the salary of the average NFL player. Why are wealthy private citizens allowed to own national sports teams in a monopolistic fashion where the players, cities, and fans are ripped off to greater and greater degrees with every passing year? The citizens have no way to control the costs, and these owners keep roughly half the profits while the players have to divide the same amount of money by 1700. It just gets worse and worse. The Commissioner works for the owners, the owners decide which citizens can ever become an owner, the owners are the police, judge, and jury for whatever player behavior they decide is unacceptable. They have their own judicial system. By what sense are very wealthy people or corporations allowed to make billions of dollars, or declare bankruptcy while making all this money and have to pay no taxes? The biggest problem is not the poor, but the very wealthy whose greed, of course, has no limit until government puts an end to all this. Some of the wealthy are very generous with their endless wealth like Gates and Buffet—and that is just peachy—but the government needs to set limits and regulations so that our wealth as a nation is distributed in some sort of fair fashion and fair doesn’t not mean doing away with the wealthy at all. Capitalism is a great system when properly regulated and proper limits set.
No group of people in our country need reparations. The past is past. What all citizens need is a level playing field. We can afford to make a level playing field and that is exactly what we should do. Except for me. God likes me, talks to me often for advice and we discuss what my needs will be in Heaven; greasing my own way to some sort of heavenly life before and after death makes perfect sense to me. Why other people have any earned rights for more materialistic wealth is beyond me. Smile.
Just to put things in perspective, let us remember that 90% of our wealth now is owned by 2-5% of our citizens. If these 2-5% of our citizens were limited via taxation to own only 20% of our nation’s wealth all schools would be good—staffed with good teachers, all citizens would have good health care, our infrastructure would be the best in the planet, safe guards to protect our natural resources would be fully funded, our police force would be free of rogue officers not equipped mentally for their job, and all policeman would be monitored periodically, all citizens would have access to jobs for which they have the talent and the jobs would all be at living wages, welfare costs would be drastically reduced because of higher wages and increased employment, the 43% of adults now not making enough money to qualify to pay federal taxes, would have money to pay taxes and buy things which would vastly increase the amount of tax money coming in to the federal treasury, and if we got rid of most of the 700 military bases around the world along with the endless penchant to invade other countries to bring them peace and prosperity, which hasn’t happened since World War II (and thus drastically reduce military expenditures without affecting the safety of our own country from attack)—if all this were put in place we would then have a government in which the maximum number of citizens would be able to achieve the maximum amount of contentment with their lives. It is win-win for all citizens, including the wealthy and more genetically gifted in our population. Forget the word socialism, it is a useless term meaning different things to different people. If providing health care for all, job opportunities for all, good wages for all, decent vacation periods for all, etc. were such a bad idea, then those governments who do these things would have been voted out of office long ago. Of course polls consistently show that people who live under such governments are happier than our own citizens. What is the surprise here since the very issues which trouble so many of our own citizens are not issues which people in these other countries have to worry about. They pay more in taxes but they have far fewer worries and what money is left is spent on pleasurable activities.
The best reparation for all citizens is to provide all fellow citizens with basic needs for a healthy, productive, prosperous, more prejudice free environments in which to live.
There is one important precautionary note here. If we cannot quickly reduce human population across the planet and do whatever is needed to prevent major climate changes, anything else done is only a temporary solution. Our human species is not exempt from the consequences of overpopulation. Overpopulation is defined here by the existence of enough natural resources for all humans to live the kind of lifestyle the fortunate few, like myself, now live.
I won’t even bother here to bring up such nuances as to how much genetic blackness would gain one a reparation, or why the descendants of blacks who were not slaves need reparations, or why native American Indians get no reparations, or gays, or descendants of the handicapped, or actually why no reparations for all the citizens those countries we have engaged in militarily since World War II? They probably still need their infrastructure back or maybe pay off all the money they spent to bury their dead. None of this means our country is more evil natured than other nations. They all would have done the same to us if they had the power to do so. Humans all have the same genetic traits as a species, and all groups behave like other groups under the same environmental circumstances.
