Comments Elsewhere

Lopez:

Are American blacks better off now than if their ancestors had been left alone in Africa? Let’s see: on the one hand you can have ignorant backwoods fucks calling you a coon, on the other hand you can have your neighbors chopping your family up with machetes.

1. If European marauders had left Africa, and the West African coast in particular, alone, then the political and economic situation there might be somewhat different from what it is today.

2. Who cares? At best you’ve offered a utilitarian argument in favor of free immigration here. But the question was about property rights, not about whether some other regime of theft and terror would have left them worse off in the end. From the standpoint of just compensation, what matters is how well-off they would have been if no theft had occurred, not how well-off they would have been if someone else were left to do the thieving.