Still think reparations sound like a good idea? Still think those who oppose them are racist, or selfish, or both? Read this. In 2000, California passed two bills: the first required the Department of Insurance to collect information about insurers' past slave policies. The second required a University of California panel to put a dollar amount on "the economic benefits of slavery." The amount the panel came up with? $1.4 trillion. The Department of Insurance report will be released tomorrow, and it seems clear enough that the information it contains can--and will--be used toward filing reparations lawsuits along the lines of those already filed earlier this year. So excited by these prospects is Jesse Jackson that he has announced his belief that this information will lead to reparations not only for African Americans, but for Chinese Americans and Mexican Americans as well. The California state legislature has been effectively doing the reparations lawyers' homework on the taxpayers' dime. Academics have been engaging in spurious economics to suit the reparations cause. And businesses are being ordered to indict themselves, or at least to supply the information that makes it possible for others to indict them--not for crimes they have committed, but for being the lineal descendants of companies that engaged in racist business practices many decades ago.

If that isn't disturbing enough, consider this. Jackson and his fellow reparations supporters do not envision reparations going to individuals to use as they need and please (though within the logic of reparations, dispensing money in such a way as to enable individual self-determination would seem to be of the utmost importance). No, Jackson sees reparations money going straight into non-profits with the victims' predetermined "best interests" at heart--organizations such as Jackson's Rainbow Coalition stand to win mightily from reparations settlements, while individual Americans most likely won't see a penny. Do you smell a conflict of interest yet? Do you smell extortion? Do you smell graft? More broadly, do you smell a huge problem for the American economy if paying slave reparations becomes a condition of doing business in California, and if other states follow suit? Do you smell the problem getting deeper and worse over time as more and more minority groups make reparations claims of their own? American morality does not need this "corrective"--which is itself hardly proceeding along moral lines. And the American economy may well not be able to handle it.