We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Tashnsky,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and to the premium
version of our website as well. Today we're joined by Michael Tanner. He
is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. He's the
author of The Inclusive Economy and also the author of a new paper that we
are going to dig into today. Michael, thanks for joining us. What
is the pleasure to be with you? Nett, tell us about I've read
the paper, but tell the audience a little bit about this latest paper that
you worked on. If you could sort of distill the ur the central argument
that you're making, that would be awesome. Sure. The paper looks at
the question that we're facing today of reparations for African Americans, and I think
that it basically makes the point that you can't deny the sort of downstream impact
of slavery and Jim Crow and ongoing inequalities in the in the economic system that
just put African Americans at a disadvantage. So the moral claim that African Americans
make the reparations is probably something that shouldn't just be waved away. There's something
that we should pay serious attention to. That said, we need to recognize
that there are practical difficulties that make reparations probably impossible in the long run and
probably not very effective in terms of relieving African American problems. So we should
be looking for more forward solutions, facing solutions, things like changing zoning laws,
the police, reform, school choice, things that will give that a
level of playing field today, rather than sort of looking back at what we
can do to make up for the sins of the past, and what are
some of those because actually, later, one of the things I did like
about the pieces that your point about the downstream effects really can't be denied,
and we can talk about it as you do the effects of maybe well intentioned
government policies as well, But tell us a little bit about what you see
as some of the most obvious or the most workable solutions going forward as well.
We sure in terms of things that are going forward, Number one is
we need to deal with zoning laws which basically have locked racial segregation and housing
into place over the years. The fact is that many whites bought into neighborhoods
back when it was restricted by race, and that there's values and hosing rises,
and we put in more stricter, restricter zoning laws to prevent other types
of housing and other types of low cost units from being in that area.
We perpetuate the segregated outing patterns of the past. If you look at demographic
zoning maps from say the nineteen thirties and you look at them today, they're
very little change in terms of where various racial groups live, and that is
a result of government policy in many cases. Second, we need to look
at education. Where you get your you know, your zip code to large
attend large extent determines how good your education is going to be. We don't
give parents the choice to get out of failing schools, and the fact is
that public schools have failed African Americans and continue to do so. Right,
and so the point about you in the paper you talk about how reparations if
we if we take the ideas for reparations at face value, which is important
because California, as you know it is working on this at the moment,
and you know, other states could follow suit if we take the idea that
reparations are are morally justified and go on to envision what may happen if some
type of workable solution from the left was enacted. You also say, you
argue that would not necessarily be good for the black community either. Well,
that's right for a lot of reasons. I mean, first of all,
we should recognize that some of the proposals out there are not really meant to
be taken seriously. No one is mailing five million dollar checks to every African
American in San Francisco an each time soon. But that said, there are
some proposals out there that need to be looked at more seriously. That sort
of eschewed the idea of white guilt and talk more in terms of about a
corporate responsibility that we have for government actions in the past, which is a
very different set of circumstances. That said, money to pay reparations would have
to come from somewhere. It's going to be either taxes or debt, depending
on whether you're talking about the state or local levels or federal government doing it.
And that's going to have a tremendous impact on the economy. It's going
to cau jobs, is going to slow economic growth, it's going to limit
entrepreneurship by making it harder for African Americans to find jobs or start businesses.
Is not exactly remedying the problem that we set out to fix. Yes,
that could clearly be a little bit counterproductive on that, and tell us so
these what we were just talking about, a lot of this is actually rolling
back, like zoning for instance. This is that there are government policies that
are in the way of prosperity or greater prosperity opportunity for the black community.
How would you describe is that the case that actually a lot of this that
some of these solutions actually can go after things that are already in the way.
If that makes sense, well, that's that should be the primary focus
right now. That if you simply pay reparations, that's going to do nothing
to desegregate housing. If you pay reparations, it's going to do nothing to
make these schools and the inner city better. What we really need to do
is be looking forward and how can we change circumstances from this point on,
Recognizing that the situation isn't fair today, But we can't go back or fix
the problems of the past. It's just much easier to criticize them than it
is to repair them. And simply doing what we've been doing, which is
throwing money at this situation, hasn't worked so far. What we really need
to do is be having a different way of looking at how can we level
the playing field for African Americans. Well, and this also eliminates the problem
with reparations that is just enduring and incredibly difficult of Even if we did agree
to do some sort of reparations, who qualifies who gets money and from whom.
That's an enduring problem. But these solutions wouldn't really actually even run into
a roadblock like that one. Well, that's right. These are essentially race
neutral solutions that will have a race conscious impact if you will that the African
Americans are more likely to go to failing schools. School choice will benefit African
Americans more they were likely to benefit middle class white students. But it's nothing
on the face of it that says that this is a race conscious solution.
So in that way, it's unlike affirmative action or unlike the type of situations
and the Supreme Court seems to be striking down right now, which are facially
raised based and the other. We can actually go to the first thing that
we mentioned here, because I think that's one of the most interesting questions,
and you address it at length in this paper, the moral justification for reparations.
If you were in conversation, as I'm sure you have been with the
skeptical conservative, maybe a skeptical black conservative, you're in conversation, maybe with
Thomas soul, and you're making the point for why this case should be made
to a skeptical conservative who says a lot of this, you know, post
the last couple of decades is not the fault of wide Americans. It's not
you know, the continue the continued effects of slavery. What would your response
to that be, Well, I think it's true that it's not the fault
of white Americans, and I don't think most of the serious reparations proposals are
sort of based on this idea of individual behavior, the idea that well,
my grandparents never owned slaves, therefore I'm not obligated. Nobody is suggesting that
it's about individual sins of the past. But you have here is government action,
and there is sort of a corporate liability that cruise to government action.
Now, if you if somebody's car hits a pothole because the road is badly
maintained, they have a claim against the city, even if that is going
to be paid for out of taxes from people who had nothing to do with
road maintenance. And that's that's a long standing legal tradition. And I think
the same thing applies in terms of reparations. These are government policies. The
government enforced segregation, the government enforced slavery, and I think that there is
an obligation to make up for what the government has done in the past.
Yeah, that's that's interesting that it's a reparation from the body that is responsible,
and obviously it's representative of the people, but it's the government sort of
shouldering the weight of the burden rather than individuals shouldering not. Well, that's
right, And you know, I do think that we can't say that all
African American problems are based on past behavior by the government or by white people
or anything of that nature. Well we can suggest, however, is that
you can't have a ten lap race. We'll have one of the racers where
changed for nine of the ten laps and strike them off and say, Okay,
everything is equal. From this point on, I think we have to
recognize that there are costs that have accrued in the past. For example,
there's about ten to fifteen trillion dollars in lost wealth to the African American community
because of lost wages from slavery or when African members are paid less under Jim
Crow and so on. That's wealth that doesn't exist in the community today that
can't be used to build businesses and to stimulate entrepreneurship and things of that nature.
Now, we can't go back and pay fifteen trillion dollars in compensation,
but we can look at those things that understand why there are inequalities in the
system today. Yeah, I'm reading from a Thomas soul op ed here.
It's from two thousand and one, and he writes decades of propaganda from black
leaders have also convinced many, if not most, blocks their achievement has been
due to political activism, and then end to racial preferences and quotas would mean
an end to their progress. Blocks lose most of all of the version of
their efforts and energies into seeking reparations that they're not going to get instead of
into the many economic opportunities that pay off a lot bigger. So actually,
Michael, this is almost the sort of happy medium. Your solution is almost
the happy medium here to pursue opportunity sort of rebranded as reparation, to say
there is a case for inequity as a consequence of slavery, as a consequence
of jim as a consequence of discrimination. The band aid not the band aid.
The solution isn't to hand out money. The solution is to roll background
tape and to people give people the opportunity to prosper. I think that's exactly
correct. I mean, look, politics doesn't have to be zero sum,
But on the other hand, political capital is not infinite, and to waste
political capital on a sort of chaotic chase after reparations that are never going to
happen, I think it's wasting an opportunity that we have right now. When
we're having kind of a long term discussion about race and what it means in
America. We have an opportunity now to make some reforms. We should be
realistic and what we're trying to achieve At the same time, we should also
recognize the simply doing what we've done for the last fifty or sixty years in
terms of throwing money it's various problems hasn't worked. And simply rebranding throwing money
at the problem is now as reparations isn't going to make it things any better
than they've been in the past. Yeah, I was going to ask about
that. You know what, Obviously we've already sort of talked about downstream wage
loss, for instance, what studies have found. And actually I think this
is something that conservatives ignored to their detriment, that government policies, as you've
mentioned, actually specifically and in ways that we can I think understand with even
quantified numbers and data, have actually directly led to inequities. It doesn't apply
to every individual, certainly, that's not the case. It doesn't mean that,
you know, somebody born in nineteen ninety is guilty of what their ancestors
did in eighteen ninety and eighteen fifty seventeen ninety. It doesn't mean that at
all. But it does mean that at least some of what we're seeing if
you think of generational wealth. I know a lot of people on the right
in particular, get frustrated by that because they don't have generational wealth. You
know, they look at their own lives and they don't see white privilege,
and that's entirely understandable. On the other hand, there are some cases,
obviously, there are some cases in the aggregate. When you look at it,
there's there's clearly an effect. What effect, then, have well intentioned
government government policies had on exacerbating some of these iniquities since the War on Poverty
and the Great Society in particular, Michael, Yeah, I mean, we
certainly have made a lot of progress in this country and we've tried very hard
to remitty the inequities, but they're still there. I mean, if you
look at terms of unemployment, to mald race, poverty, race well,
intergenerational wealth, all those sorts of things, you find that they are not
evenly distributed by race, and a lot of that can be traced back to
these sort of downstream impacts that we've been talking about. Now, how do
you go about fixing that? I think that what we need to be doing
is looking at the problem itself and saying how do we fix that problem?
Not trying to sort of reach back and say, how do we fix the
original cause we can't do that. I mean, essentially, the debt we
owe African Americans in terms of slavery and Jim Crow and four hundred years of
maltreatment by the government is not a payable one. So let's let's get real
and see what we can do. You wrote a book called The Inclusive Economy,
as we mentioned at the top, and actually this is this paper is
in the same sort of thematic ballpark of that book. And in the book,
I'm reading from the description because it's a it's interesting to talk about combining
social justice with limited government. Your plan includes reforming the criminal justice system and
curtailing the warrant drugs, bringing down the cost of housing, reforming education and
give more control and choice to parents, and making it easier to bank,
they borrow and invest. I want to talk about the War on drug point,
because that is interesting. We saw the Trump administration pursue it, and
now a lot of people on the right criticizing Trump from the right on the
particular his policy in that case, the one that sort of famously brought together
Kim Kardashian and Ivanka and Jared. But what role does the war on drugs.
I can imagine a lot of people on the left saying, actually,
that is one of the very biggest roadblocks right now to escaping the cycle of
poverty in the black community. So what role from your perspective does that play
in this entire landscape. Well, I think the whole criminal justice reform issue
often gets oversimplified as being either soft on crime or tough on crime. And
in reality, what African Americans want, and what low income people want,
and what Americans want is effectiveness on crime. They watched to find people who
are repeat criminals, people who are causing problems, peop who are violent and
take them off the street. And the fact is that, especially in low
income communities, far too often the policing is haphazard. The clearance rate for
crimes is very small, the amount of efort put into actually finding criminals is
pretty small. At the same time, in order to make the charts look
good and make your arrest rates look good, there's often an over emphasis on
petty crimes that are out there. So you start arresting people with marijuana,
for example, or simple possession of drugs, and often that that builds up
your stats but doesn't do anything to get real criminals off the street. Yeah,
that makes sense. Are there are other I guess things in that along
those lines. So we're on drugs and we're talking about I mean, obviously,
again, like Thomas soul Is, a lot of people on the right
would would say, there are cultural roadblocks that will just you know, we
can do opportunity zones, we can do reverse zoning laws, we can we
can do all of these things, and there will still be deep seated sort
of cultural problems, for instance, a single parenthood etcetera, etcetera, although
there's probably an argument actually that single parenthood itself is downstream a sort of great
society. We're on poverty, government policies that can be changed in and of
themselves. I imagine you're actually probably familiar with some of those things in the
welfare system that could probably be tweaked in a helpful way. Well, we
do just incentivize marriage and in marriage childbearing through the welfare system. We also
discourage marriage in a number of other ways. We do know that it's generally
better to be married than not because the two incomes is better than one,
although cohabitation often has made a big difference than in those terms. But it's
also we know that women who have children outside of marriage are much more likely
to be poor than those who don't have children or who wait until after they're
married to have children. That said, the question is exactly who poor black
women are going to marry. We often behave as if this is giant pool
of inner city computer programmers that are just waiting for them. The reality is
that a lot of our policies have made it difficult for African American men to
get the type of jobs that are going to support their families. That you
do have to deal with the criminal justice issues in the inner city. William
Julius Wilson points out that about a million and a half young Black men have
been taken out of the marriage pool because they now have criminal records or tied
up in the criminal justice system in some way that makes it difficult for them
to be a good provider in terms of a family. Yeah, that's exactly
where I was going to ask next. So you've already answered the question I
want to ask also about There's so much to talk about here. I want
to ask about. I guess the combination or let me just have something more
specific. Tim Scott is obviously running for president and made a lot of headlines
with his opportunity zone Paul that was added to the Trump administration's tax bill that
passed was that twenty seventeen now is there and that's, by the way,
something that is and you could probably explain this but then I can, but
that's something that was business friendly allowed for sort of investment incentives. Is that
something that you find helpful? Michael? Did you think that policy worked out
well? Because I feel like that's pretty representative of the way a lot of
conservatives have approached this issue. And you know, it's it's now been on
the books for you know, half a half a decade roughly. But what
have you seen when we look at opportunity zones? Is there something to go
off of their going forward? I think it's theory. They make sense and
like good many of the free markets years, I was much in favor of
enterprise zones or opportunity zones when the idea first came out. I think Jack
Kemp going way back, was one of the first to push on that idea,
and of course Reagan and others. Uh. Then then they sort of
fell out of disfavor. There was a lot of evidence to suggests that they
didn't really create new businesses. They simply moved businesses from one part of town
to another. There was a great deal of corruption in the awarding of opportunity
zone designation that they're well connected managed to get their business designated and others were
left out. So they sort of fell out of favor, and the idea
became that they weren't really working. A couple of studies recently within the last
year of come out now and suggested that maybe we should rethink them because there
is evidence that they are starting new businesses and guiding businesses in the underserved areas.
So I think this is open for debate right now. We really need
to look at more research on it. But I think it's something that's not
it's a program whose hearts in the right place. Yeah, So that's actually
where I was going to go with that was wondering. You know that I
have heard some of the questions about chronyism when it comes to opportunity zones,
and you know, investment incentives that can lead to this is just a problematic
relationship between government and business. But uh, you know, in the overall
sort of picture of them, I do feel like they're representative of the way
a lot of people on the right have approached this. And as somebody who's
studied this for a very long time written books on this, I wanted to
ask Michael what you think it is. And some of this is in the
paper, but just kind of overall, looking at the last couple of decades
and maybe even the very very recent past, what you think it is that
conservatives get wrong when they approach the question of poverty from a policy perspective.
Is are there certain things that conservatives still are not understanding or that they're still
sort of clinging to in these policies, or there's certain things that they just
need to sort of open their minds too that they haven't in the past.
Yeah, I think we need to recognize that poverty is not a moral failing.
I think there's still a sort of a Darwinian response social darwinners in response
in there that suggests that if people are purged, their own fault because they've
made a lot of bad decisions over the or their life, and in many
cases, of course, those bad decisions have led to increase poverty or harder
to get out of poverty. On the other hand, we don't live in
a pure meritocracy. Things like luck do play a role. Things like race
and where you're born and what your parents do and where your parents came from.
All those sorts of things do play factors in this, and we should
so we should recognize that poverty often has many multifaceted causes and we should be
looking to them. That doesn't mean that we need to simply get people more
money. Too Much of our anti poverty policies have been based on the idea
that somehow we're going to make poverty less miserable. If we give people enough
money, we'll make sure that they get fed and a roof over their head
and clothing and medical care. But they're not becoming self sufficient. They're not
able to be fully actualized, to rise as far as their individual talents can
take them. We should be focusing less on sort of the survivable level of
poverty and more on the idea of how we can enable people to eyes out
of it. And I think that the sort of conservatives and liberals both don't
want to talk about that. Hmm, yeah, no, that's that's a
really interesting way to put it. If this were, you know, sort
of politically let's say there's a Republican president and Republican controlled the Congress going forward,
but maybe, you know, like in previous times or actually this administration
itself, there's been a need to compromise on a bipartisan level. How how
should conservatives pitch this to the left? And I asked that because if people
read the paper I think they see it, they'll they'll read language that you're
using in a way that is intentionally written, crafted to uh, you know,
find be persuasive and and find agreement. So, you know, and
hypothetically, if if a conservatives work on free market based anti poverty programs with
the left, what's the best way to sort of take somebody who is pro
uh your government check based reparations and bring them to the side. Yeah,
I think we have to ask them what is the purpose of the programs they're
proposing? Why are they suggesting we do what we do? And then if
we agree with the final outcome on that, we just then we ask is
this the best way to achieve it? I think to some degree we have
to come to common ground in terms of what are what would be the ideal
outcome if we could lift more people out of poverty. If we could start
more on businesses, if we could create more jobs, would we think that
that would solve the problem. And I think it would go a long way
towards doing so. And then it's a matter once we reach agreement on the
goal, then we can sort of negotiate the details of how to get there.
But I think we've got to talk in terms of common language on what
it is we're trying to achieve. You know, it's so interesting because there's
this chart that always goes viral that AI updates every once in a while.
You've probably seen it, Michael. I think it's Mark Perry's chart. Where
do you see the cost of certain woods? Since I think it's like about
nineteen eighty that are the Some of the costs are going up, some of
the costs are going down. And you see the cost of things that are
going down. It's like TVs and those types of things. The things that
are going up, it's it's housing, it's medical care. And this really
gets you know, some some people on the New Right, myself included,
there's you can understand why a lot of people are frustrated with this economy when
you look at a trit like that, but then also, uh, you
libertarians very rightfully point out, they'll write, you know, where the subsidies
are going on the graph, like they'll actually like add it to the to
the graph itself, the words, you know, subsidies. And it's absolutely
true, things like housing and healthcare that are not helpful for people who are
trying to escape the cycle of poverty, that are trying to move up the
socioeconomic ladder and enjoy upward mobility that probably was more accessible in earlier eras,
those are heavily subsidized. And that is not just the faults of the left,
that is also the faults of the right. It is some of this
the faults of Republicans for being too cozy with industry in many of these cases.
Oh, absolutely, we should recognize that most of what we spend on
fighting poverty never goes to a poor person. It goes to a large group
of people who basically serve the poor, whether that's landlords or doctors or grocery
stores or whatever. But very little of it actually ends up directly in the
hands of a poor person. You know, the big fight over food stamps
every year is not necessarily split along Democratic Republican line to split between urban Democrats
and farm state Republicans who favor increase food stamps spending, and people who are
at outside of those two categories who worry about where the money's going. Yeah,
And the reason I ask that is actually because as the new right types,
they're conceiving new ways to help people at the sort of lower end of
the scioeconomic ladder. Out of their solutions are subsidy base and that is I
feel like it's a very clear lesson that we've learned from the past that it's
probably not the best way to go about because it doesn't have the intended consequences.
And at this point we have decades of the experiment being run giving us
evidence in that direction. Yeah, right wing subsidies are not likely to be
more successful than left wing subsidies, I think we can suggest. I mean,
just look at a case for example, in terms of housing, we
provide housing bodies vouchers based on sort of median rents in an area. That
means if you have a terrible housing policy, your zoning laws are so strict,
you have other restrictions on building of environmental policies like let's say California for
instance, that makes the housing costs extremely expensive. We increase the subsidy,
and we reward you for having that terrible policy. We really should be making
any subsidies and tangent on their making reforms that are going to lower the cost
of housing now reforms that drive up the cost of housing. But sounds impossible
just with this government. The thing I wanted to also end on is you
look at previous examples. And again, one thing I like about this paper
is you look at the way the United States has approached Native Americans. You
look at the way actually that Ronald Reagan approached the consequences of Japanese internment.
There are some concrete examples in American history of the government deciding listen, something
is owed here, and we can do it. There's a workable solution.
But reparations have become a right so politically charged and partisan because of the I
think the word itself and there are competing definitions of it, but that the
term has just become a political lightning rod. If we tear away some of
the chatter and try to look through the political fog, there are some a
legitimate concerns and then be workable solutions. When you were looking back at the
past, and you even look over Europe the years after the Holocaust that was
approached. What lessons can we take historically from how different places have approached this
problem in different situations. Well, I think those places that have tried to
address specific instances of mistreatment for minorities I've been the most successful. Virginia,
for example, has not gotten a lot of grief over its reparations programs,
but it actually has one that was just recently extended by Governor Junkin, which
dealt with the fact that in the nineteen fifties the schools were largely closed the
Great Defiance went on, and a lot of southern states and when the integration
took place, they shut down the public schools. Well, there's actually a
fund in Virginia to compensate people who lost their education because their school was shut
down or they couldn't get to school, and that was just extended. So
I think that sort of discrete, targeted approaches. The police torture case in
Chicago, for example, or reparations for some of the African American communities that
were destroyed during Jim Crowe, those type of things tend to have the most
excessive reparations, but none of them are going to solve the long term problems
that we face. Yeah, I thought what you heard about the Native American
community in particular, where they ended up getting less than a thousand dollars apiece,
and it was in I think what like it went to a large conglomerated
fund, something to that effect. I found that to be pretty interesting example
of maybe even a persuasive example to the left when they're arguing for reparations.
There seems to be something to learn from that example. Yeah, given the
money to the bureaucracy doesn't necessarily rebound to the benefit of the supposed recipient.
I think the Native Americans are a great case. We we actually had two
different programs that were designed to provide reparations for taking Native American land, and
Native Americans got very little of it. Yeah, that's I think unsurprising,
tragically unsurprising, but unsurprising. Nonetheless. Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at
the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity known as free OP and the author of
The Inclusive Economy, also the author of the paper We've been discussing, which
you can read at freeop dot org. It's called insider reparations, expand opportunities
for African Americans. Michael, thanks for joining the show. My pleasure.
You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emil Jashnski,
culture editory here at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more.
Until then, the lovers of freedom and anxious for the fright her the favors
a reason, then faded away.