Nothing is made better and much is made worse

From What Happened When One Illinois Town Passed Reparations by Adam Popescu.  The subheading is  Is Evanston a model for the rest of the nation? Or a cautionary tale? A story of idealism meeting reality.

I had hoped for more from this case study.  I am strongly against the whole notion of reparations, being as it is,  simultaneously racist, pointless, perverse, unethical and autocratic.  There is no case to be made for it under our tradition of law or ethics.  Everyone who attempts to do so come across as naive, ignorant or a grifter.  Or, frequently, all three.

Two of the most pernicious consequences of the fixation of the cargo cult of reparations is that it both isolates people from responsibility for creating their own future (while they wait for someone else to give them unearned money) and it continues to treat black American citizens as second class citizens, effectively perpetual wards of the state.  

A wealthy suburban town, Evanston, Illinois, passed a law funding a limited program of reparations.  Up to $25,000 would be paid by the city to black residents who lived in the town from 1919-1969.  The program began in 2021.  It seems like the grants might be limited to $25,000. 

The justification seems to rest more on reparations for the consequences of Jim Crow laws and for Redlining rather than for slavery.

Most the article is a complete waste of words.  It makes no philosophical case for reparations and offers no empirical evidence for success or effectiveness.  It merely rehashes the many efforts of advocacy grifters to pass reparation programs that no one else is interested in passing.  

So what can we learn from the Evanston case study?  Not much, given the limits of the program.  

Reparations in the city have done practically nothing to lay the seedbed for the “intergenerational wealth” its supporters envisioned. That’s because the city could afford only to allocate $400,000 for its first round of recipients, meaning only a tiny fraction of Evanston’s black community has received any money: out of roughly 12,000 black residents in the city, only 674 have applied for reparations, and out of those 674, only 59—total—have received them. 

59 people over a couple of years.  It appears that the money is being spent on home repairs.  

And even this pinprick of a program seems unsustainable.  A couple of the council sponsors seem to have been excited about the prestige that taxpayer money would bring them.

“People were in awe of us,” Evanston city council member Robin Rue Simmons, the plan’s architect, said in November 2019, shortly after the historic 8–1 vote.

City council member Ann Rainey said she was unaware “of even one city that was doing anything along these lines. There’s a lot of talk of equity and diversity, but nobody was talking about reparations except for us.”

But buying council member's some prestige is expensive and they did not apparently actually plan, prioritize, do due diligence, or make hard trade-off decisions.  They simply hoped for manna from heaven.  

That’s because the city had planned to cover reparations with a cannabis sales tax. And officials wildly overestimated how much money that would bring in.

When I asked Evanston city council member Devon Reid whether anyone on the council had thought about how the city would pay for reparations, he said: “I honestly don’t think we ever fully considered it.” When they voted for the measure, he added, “I thought, ‘What the hell are we doing? We’ll never be able to meet this obligation.’ ”

Much of the rest of the article are feel-good or feel-bad vignettes of poor people who would really like the free money being bandied about with regard to reparations.  

So we have an ethically dubious public policy which makes Council members feel good about themselves, which is narrowly tailored to serve hardly anyone at all with very little money.  The little money provided was anticipated to be "free money" to the council and now that they have to choose between continuing reparations and cutting other programs and services, one picks up the distinct sense that reparations will have a short half life.

The hard reality is that reparations for historical grievances (as opposed to contemporary issues) is a legal and ethical non-starter in addition to being financially unfeasible in addition to being inconsequential.  Nothing is made better and much made worse.