• At Libertarianism.org, Jonathan Blanks asks “Why Aren’t There More Black Libertarians?” Here’s part of his answer.

A common libertarian narrative involves looking backward to better times, back to the Founding when the Constitution was respected—to a time of freer markets and something much closer to constitutional purity. Yet, to those of us who must look to bills of sale and property lists to find our ancestors, the look back is with much less yearning.

Today, we’re closer to a more perfect union than we’ve ever been before, even with all the government interference and wasteful spending, because more markets are opening up to more people, not just here but around the globe. Yet, by some accounts, libertarians and other fellow travelers are talking about “taking back the country” and returning to some misbegotten glory days of yore that very few blacks recognize.

• Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on “The Case for Reparations” has provoked a good deal of discussion around the web.  Libertarians will nod their heads when Coates writes about the role played by the government in perpetuating racial discrimination, especially in the housing market. But, of course, government racism was in many ways merely a reflection of a broader cultural racism, and Coates documents in depressing detail just how destructive private racism could be, with or without the support of the state.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Sometimes the attacks were intended simply to “thin out the niggers a little.”

• Tyler Cowen argues that most white Americans were probably harmed, rather than helped, by the existence of slavery. He notes at the conclusion of his post that this fact does not undermine the moral case for reparations. And this is an often misunderstood but important point. As I wrote elsewhere:

Suppose slavery really was grossly inefficient – suppose we had paid slaves merely to roll rocks from one side of a field to another (an example I borrow from David Boonin’s excellent book, Should Race Matter?). Even if this slavery had made us all poorer, it’s hard to see how this fact would undermine the claim that slaves (or their descendants) are owed compensation for the harms unjustly imposed on them.    

Of course, we didn’t inflict the harms, and those on whom the harms were directly inflicted (at least, the harms of slavery itself) are long since dead. This weakens the case for reparations somewhat, but I don’t think it entirely eliminates it. We hold the US government of today responsible for the debts incurred by the US government 20 years ago in the case of bond interest, liability for false imprisonment, pensions, etc. It isn’t clear to me that we have good grounds for distinguishing those kind of debts from the sorts of debts incurred by the moral wrongs of slavery and state-imposed discrimination. I address that point a bit here, but again I recommend Boonin’s book for a much more thorough defense.