Yeah, Let's Talk About Reparations, Concentration Camps, etc.

The problem with our lefty friends is that they don't really want to have what they call a "conversation." Their idea of conversation is the deployment of catchphrases by activists in ideological combat: words as weapons.

Let's take slavery and reparations. First, slavery.

Slavery was ubiquitious in human society up until the day before yesterday. Ancient Greeks? Slavery. Romans? Slavery. A thousand years ago in Europe? Here are a few words from The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

Welleas, or Welshman, was one of the Old English words for slave -- which showed where the Anglo Saxons got their slaves... Bristol was a slave port, trading with the Viking slave merchants based in Ireland. According to contemporary chronicles, eleventh-century Dublin operated the largest slave market in western Europe.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine and distress... [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands... It was a basic transaction -- heads for food.

And, of course, plantation slavery started right after the Crusades when western Europeans learned about sugar cane from their Muslim enemies. The first slave sugar plantations were established on Cyprus, were financed by Venetian merchants, and used local serfs and Muslim slaves as labor. I should say western capitalistic slave plantations. It was the beginning of a big business that spread westward to the Islas Canarias and then to South America. The Brits got involved in 1640 when they learned the business from the Dutch and set up slave plantations in Barbados.

And then, sometime in the 18th century, slave plantations started to become a scandal. Why? My take is: partly the populist moralism of the Great Awakening, and partly upper-class resentment of the new slave barons -- think the Bertrams of Mansfield Park -- that were building obscene mansions and pushing their way into the Brit Parliament. Also, I suspect, there is this. Slaves have to be guarded and disciplined with the cow-hide whip -- and fed, and housed. But free labor just has to be paid: must less bother. And, lefty politicians have been glad to take the workers off the hands of the ca-pittle-ists and make them into neo-serfs and neo-slaves in the great plantation -- or concentration camp -- of the welfare state. And then the biggest reason of all. With free labor the ca-pittle-ists make more money than with slave labor. Who knew?

What about reparations? Old as the hills. Back in the day, of course, the whole point of "conquest warfare" was loot and plunder. Reparations was the plundering of a defeated people. And it makes sense because back in the day wealth was equal to land and to grain stores and livestock. So the Vikings would visit the Brits every fall, sail up the rivers, take the grain, kill the men and transport the women and children to the slave market in Dublin. That'll teach 'em.

My take is that loot and plunder -- the noble and woke civilized looting operations of the big government welfare state excepted -- has only become scandalous because it does not pay in the modern world where something like 80 percent of wealth or capital is "intangible" capital, the kind that resides between human ears. And I predict that the days of the welfare state are numbered because it does not pay. Much better to have the workers save for their own retirement and health care. They will work a lot harder than when retirement and health care are managed neo-feudal style in entitlement programs run by the educated ruling class.

That's another reason why concentration camps are probably on their way out. (Modern concentration camps were invented by the Brits, by the way, in the Boer War in South Africa. They were not concentrating the innocent Bantu warriors of Shaka the Zulu, by the way, but the Dutch Boers, who were conducting a guerrilla war against the armies of Britland.) Just look at the absolute waste of the Nazi concentration/labor/death camps. I'd say that if you were conducting a global war for Lebensraum you would want to mobilize everyone in the glorious Reich to produce the sinews of war. And that means mobilize their minds. And who has sharper minds than the Jews? And let us not forget the labor/death camps of the Bolsheviks: the Gulag Archipelago; the White Sea Canal; the Kolyma goldfields.

Sorry, Mao ZeDong and Pol Pot. I didn't mean to insult you guys. You chaps had slavery and concentration camps that were tops. And your famines were the best. Made those white supremacists in Europe and North America look like pikers.

My point is that slavery and concentration camps and piles of skulls are as human as apple pie. The astonishing thing is that we moderns, for all our follies and faults, have come to think of slavery and concentration camps and Trails of Tears as scandalous.

But I do not think our modern ideas indicate a more advanced morality. Not at all. I just think that we are stumbling towards a realization that loot and plunder and slaves and camps are brutally inefficient ways for the ruling class to get rich off the labor of their deplorable subjects. Much better to let creative minds loose and turn responsible wage-earners to their jobs. And just tax 'em at the rate approved by Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Art Laffer according to his eponymous curve.

And then everyone will live happily ever after.

Reparations? I agree with Ryan Bomberger, who identifies as half-white half-black. Let the Democratic Party pay for reparations. They, after all, were the party of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the KKK, of Bull Connor, of the neo-slavery of the welfare state. Let the enthusiasts of the Great Awokening pay reparations, and save their activist souls.