California Reparations Report Should Disappoint Black Residents and Everybody Else

People listen to the California reparations task force, a nine-member committee studying restitution proposals for African Americans, at a meeting at Lesser Hall in Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, Calif., on May 6, 2023. (Sophie Austin/AP Photo)

Commentary

What a missed opportunity. On Saturday, the California Reparations Task Force issued its final recommendations (pdf) for “any form of compensation to African Americans, with a special consideration for African Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States.” Those are the words from Assembly Bill 3121, the 2020 law establishing the Task Force. Even though California never was a slave state.

The Task Force could have brought together all Californians, beginning with the 5 percent who are black, to heal the wounds of the past and move everybody toward a more prosperous and kinder future. Indeed, it might have renamed itself the Reconciliation Task Force or the Aspiration Task Force.

Instead, all we got were the same old grievances, politically correct historical narratives from the New York Times’s 1619 Project (discredited even by liberal historians), and demands for money from a state treasury running a massive deficit of at least $22.5 billion. These all are magic numbers anyway. The demand of up to $1.2 million in reparations for each eligible black Californian could amount to $800 billion, or more than 2.5 times the state’s annual budget.

Black Achievement

Who made these calculations? The lead economist is William Spriggs, chief economist for the AFL-CIO and an economics professor at Howard University. He’s black. But a better black economist is the late Walter Williams, whose brilliant columns I miss. Here’s something he wrote in July 2020, just before his death at age 84:

“Many whites are ashamed, saddened and feel guilty about our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. Many black people remain angry over the injustices of the past and what they see as injustices of the present. Both blacks and whites can benefit from a better appreciation of black history.

“Often overlooked or ignored is the fact that, as a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles, and in a shorter span of time than any other racial group in history.

“For example, if one totaled up the earnings and spending of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank well within the top 20 richest nations. A black American, Gen. Colin Powell, once headed the world’s mightiest military. black Americans are among the world’s most famous personalities, and a few black Americans are among the world’s richest people such as investor Robert F. Smith, IT service provider David Steward, Oprah Winfrey and basketball star Michael Jordan. Plus, there was a black U.S. president.

“The significance of these achievements cannot be overstated. When the Civil War ended, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed such progress would be possible in less than a century and a half — if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as important, it speaks to the greatness of a nation in which such gains were possible. Nowhere else on Earth could such progress have been achieved except in the United States of America.”

It gives me pause thinking how beautiful that is. Williams really loved America and appreciated how this country gave him, a descendant of slaves, the opportunity to achieve greatness himself.

The Role of the Unions

Williams started his academic career 50 years ago with a still incisive study of how the minimum wage hurt black workers, especially youngsters. Well, guess what? The Task Force recommended a minimum wage higher even than the $15.50 already on the books in California.

I wrote about the damage this would do to black Californians in The Epoch Times back in 2021. It’s worth quoting Williams again from his study for Policy Review magazine called “Government Sanctioned Restraints that Reduce Economic Opportunity for Minorities.”

Williams wrote:

“The minimum wage law gives firms effective economic incentive to hire only the most productive employees which means that firms are less willing to hire and/or train the least productive, which includes teenagers and particularly minority teenagers. But holding all else constant, such as worker productivity, such a wage law gives firms the incentive to indulge in whatever preferences that they may hold.”

He also pointed out how labor unions—such as Spriggs’s AFL-CIO—have added to discrimination against blacks and other minorities by restricting free markets through special trade rules and regulations. When there’s a true free market, blacks without special licenses, but just as adept at their jobs, can bid for a lower labor cost and win contracts over higher-priced union contracts that mandate special licenses. The licenses themselves do the discriminating.

Williams noted, “Even a cursory review of the labor movement in the United States demonstrates how organized labor, with but a few exceptions, sought to exclude Negroes and other minorities from many job markets.”

Perhaps the AFL-CIO ought voluntarily to pay reparations for the damage its policies over the decades have done to blacks—instead of hitting up the taxpayers for damages they are not responsible for personally.

If the Task Force really sought to help blacks, it would be calling for an end to pervasive licensing and union power. As Williams writes, it’s the free market that provided the way upward for blacks, while laws and union restrictions only impeded that rise.

Real Reforms to Help Blacks

Along the line of Williams’s research and writing, here are some real recommendations the Task Force ought to have approved:

• Make California a Right-to-Work State, which would reduce union powers that limit black participation in the work force.
• End Project Labor Agreements which, as the Association of Builders and Contractors writes, “discourage quality contractors and the more than 87% of U.S. construction workers who choose to not join a union from bidding and working on projects in their own communities.” Ending PLAs also would cut in half the cost of building government-subsidized housing, helping ease the state’s housing and homelessness crises.
• Reform the California Environmental Quality Act to encourage construction.

Conclusion

I seem to be one of the few who’s covering the real meaning of this retrograde Task Force. My previous articles on it are here: one, two, three, four, and five.

Sentiments of revenge and resentment will do nothing but divide us even further. And certainly will not advance the great progress, as Williams tallied, made by blacks already.

We need instead Williams’s hard-headed economic realism, combined with his optimism and faith in good old American patriotism.

John Seiler’s email: [email protected]

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.