By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 08, 2020
California’s state legislature just passed, and Governor
Gavin Newsom signed, Assembly Bill 3121 to explore providing reparations to
California’s African-American population — 155 years after the abolition of
slavery.
Apparently, when California’s one-party government cannot
find solutions to current existential crises, it turns to divisive issues that
have little to do with the safety and well-being of its 40 million citizens.
California has the highest gas taxes in the nation, even as
its ossified state highways remain clogged and dangerous. Why, then, does
Sacramento kept pouring billions of dollars into the now-calcified
high-speed-rail project?
When fires raged, killed dozens, polluted the air for
months, consumed thousands of structures, and scorched 4 million acres of
forest, the governor reacted by thundering about global warming. But Newsom was
mostly mute about state and federal green policies that discouraged the removal
of millions of dead and drought-stricken trees, which provided the kindling for
the infernos.
When gasoline, sales, and income taxes rose, and yet
state schools became even worse, infrastructure remained decrepit, and deficits
grew, California demanded that federal COVID-19 money bail out its own
financial mismanagement.
In a time of pandemic, mass quarantine, self-induced
recession, riot, arson, and looting, the California way is to borrow money to
spend on something that will not address why residents can’t find a job, can’t
rely on their power grid, can’t drive safely, can’t breathe the air, can’t
ensure a high-quality education for their children, and can’t walk the streets
of the state’s major cities without fear of being assaulted or stepping in
excrement.
So it is a poor time to discuss reparations, even if
there were good reasons to borrow to pay out such compensation. But in fact
there are none.
Four points:
One, California was admitted to the Union in 1850 as a
free state. Its moral insistence 170 years ago that slavery be outlawed
precipitated a crisis — and almost sparked the Civil War ten years before it
actually began. Despite the efforts of some slave-owning arrivals into
California, there was never legal slavery in the state.
Two, about 27 percent of California residents were not
born in the United States. Most of the naturalized citizens and undocumented
immigrants arrived in the state after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.
How, then, do California residents from Asia, Latin America, or Europe owe
reparations to the current 6.5 percent of the state’s population that is
African American?
Are we to establish a precedent that those who never
owned slaves in a society that has no memory of slavery are to redistribute
billions of their dollars to those whose grandparents were never slaves?
Three, in a multiethnic, multiracial California — where
those identifying as white are a minority, and those of mixed ancestries number
in the millions — how does the state adjudicate who owes what to whom?
Is an arriving Mexican immigrant a victim of
institutionalized racism in Mexico, or was he part of a Mexican establishment
notorious for its racism? In a multiracial state, will we adopt ancient “one
drop” Confederate race laws to determine whose DNA qualifies someone for state
money?
Should the state pay reparations to the descendants of
Jews who fled the Holocaust, of Cambodians who fled Pol Pot’s reign of death,
of Armenians who escaped Ottoman barbarity, or of Irish and Chinese who were
worked to death on the Transcontinental Railroad?
Four, how will borrowing money to pay some 2 million to 3
million of the state’s 40 million residents make things easier for the
African-American population? And are multimillionaire state residents such as
LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey, Kanye West, Jay-Z and Beyoncé eligible?
Did it mean nothing that trillions of dollars have been
spent over the last half-century on anti-poverty programs, state entitlements,
and diversity and inclusion programs?
If per capita economic parity for the black population is
truly the state’s concern, then why not allow more charter schools in
California’s inner cities? Or deregulate the state’s cumbersome bureaucracy to
give small businesses more opportunity and reduce resistance to building
low-income housing?
It is said that California fails because its wealthy
elites virtue-signal their caring to square the circle of their own impotence
to solve the problems in their midst. Californians who live in gated homes
often damn walls on the border. Those who depend on imported water damn water
transference for agriculture. Those who put their children in private academies
damn public charter schools. And those who raise taxes on the middle class have
tax experts to find ways of avoiding taxes.
In that context, Assembly Bill 3121 can be understood — as a loud virtue signal to make up for failed responses to concrete crises.
No comments:
Post a Comment