>Well, Nathan, I'm trying to steer LBO-talk away from its addiction to
>Horowitz & toward reparations (among other topics). You are not
>helping! :-)
For that purpose, then, I would love to see the reparations campaign tied to the fight against the estate tax repeal. The Horowitz types argue that those born today owe nothing for past abuses in the country, since each generation in our meritocracy starts off with a fresh baptismal clensing of past sins. Yet, we allow fortunes, amassed in the past under those conditions of racism, to be passed onto new generations.
It would seem that the best ideological approach to reparations would be to target such fortunes as the source for reparations. It makes sense sociallly and on the purely opportunistic level, since estate taxes are not paid by working class families, it avoids exactly the "backlash" politics that folks like Horowitz want to stir up among middle class whites and asians.
-- Nathan Newman