No majority society has ever self-taxed for historic wrongs

Evidence

Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument. But as a practical matter, it is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time to make that right. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 514

Categorization

• QUESTION: Obama’s framing is the strongest practical objection to her go-big proposal — is there actually no historical precedent of a majority population voluntarily redirecting resources for historic wrongs? Postwar Germany’s restitution to Israel/individual Jews is the nearest test case worth probing.
• DEEPTHINKING: Obama grants the moral case fully and concedes the wrong, relocating the whole defeat to historical feasibility — an unusually clean articulation of the practical objection that any reparations brief must defeat.