Instead of Reparations: What Can Be Done For the Black Community

By Robert Wenzel

The New York Times columnist David Brooks is the latest to call for reparations.

In a new column, he writes:

Slavery doesn’t merely cause pain and suffering to the slave. It is a corruption that infects the whole society. It is a collective debt that will have to be paid.

The list just grows.

But at the same time that these calls for reparations emerge, not a word is said about the many ways blacks (and some others) remain in an enslaved type state today.

Maybe it is time we forget the call for reparations from people who had nothing, zero, to do with slavery and focus on freeing American blacks today.

There are many things we can do:

Eliminate the minimum wage for blacks (and others) so that they can get a job and get exposed to the job experience (See: How to Smash Slick Lefties Who Advocate the Minimum Wage).

Eliminate mandatory attendance at school--school which is a counter-productive horrific experience for black children in the inner city.

Immediately release from prison all non-violent drug offenders (who are, of course, predominately black).

In other words, allow blacks to compete with the rest of us in free markets without being enslaved in so many ways by the government.

So let us knock off this "collective guilt" for events that had zero to do with us and focus on removing the chains that are placed on the black community today.

Where are the advocates for this potential real-time freedom?

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.