[riquito]

> Would be interested in your justification for holding citizens of today's US responsible for an event that happened more than 100 years ago, before they lived or breathed.

Of course they are responsible, who else should be if not the one who are getting the historical benefits?

Do you use "we" in your country only to refer to the good parts of your history, or up to the day you set foot on it?

Do you think countries' debt should be cancelled every 50 year or so?

[gwright]

> Of course they are responsible, who else should be if not the one who are getting the historical benefits?

This idea of generational responsibility, taken to its full extent, might have some unintended consequences. For example, aren't there historical records that indicate that the at least some Native American tribes themselves fought over territory? How should those claims be adjudicated?

How does this logic work for Dreamers(DACA beneficiaries)? Should a child who benefits from their parent's illegal activities be punished years later? Should the grand-children be punished? great-grandchildren? The Supreme Court even ruled recently that DACA was illegally established. BTW, this is another good example where Congress should have passed legislation rather then letting the situation live in legal limbo.

[sjy]

The argument for reparations is not about punishment for past crimes. It is about remediating inequity that still exists today as a result of those crimes.

[gwright]

But presumably the reparations have to be paid from one group to another group. And perhaps there is a third group that pays nothing and gets nothing (recent immigrants?). So if you are in the group that has to pay out the reparations aren't you being punished for the actions of your ancestors?

As complicated as these considerations are, I still wonder about the unintended side effects if there were indeed some sort of substantial transfer of wealth from some subset of Americans to descendants of slaves. Wouldn't that create a terribly animosity between those groups and what if that transfer of wealth didn't actually resolve the disparities? What if 10 years later the metrics used to measure those disparities indicated that they still existed? More reparations? It isn't clear to me that wealth transfer can actually remedy many of the disparities that are observed. I think it is quite a bit more complex than that.