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I warned Reagan this would happen when he approved cash to the internees.

With the Japanese internees it is still different than with Black slavery. The interneses compensated for their injury were still alive and could easily document the properties, homes and businesses that they lost. The perpetrators were mostly dead but their children were close enough to the harm that it was reasonable that many would wish to make ammends to those harmed by persons so close to them.

With slavery the differences are obveous. There are no remnants of living witness, or even anyone alive who has heard a firsthand account, muchless any personal culpability. My family, like most others in America, immigrated to the US following the war. A war that consumed nearly a million American soldiers, plus an equal number of soldiers in rebellion; that sounds like a good downpayment right there.
So who’s culpable for slavery, and where are the victims. Slaves merely worked land stolen from indigenous populations if indians; so rather than bother with slave reparations maybe we should just give everything to the indians.

You’re missing the point of the post, which was not about reparations; it was about press cheerleading. The article, indeed, contains no indication that anything has changed legally or politically in terms of reparations, but merely justifies its own wished by quoting talking heads with an interest in the debate.

Shouldnt decendents of slaveowners be compensated for the loss of legal and valualble property at the hands marauding US forces who violated the Articles of War and the Geneva Convention in the prosecution of an illegal aggression?

I’ll grant that slaveowners did have their property taken. A simple reading of the Emancipation Proclamation indicates that Lincoln’s justification for emancipation was that in wartime he, as commander in chief, could appropriate the property of citizens in rebelion. The legal claims of the proclamation involved the justification of the taking of property of only those citizens with slaves in the areas of rebelion. It did not free slaves in non-rebel areas (like Missouri) because the president did not have the authority to take property in these areas.
Thus Lincoln’s act was under the laws of the nation and constitution of the time a taking of property.

As Walter Olson seems to suggest, the reporter’s story is devoid of discussion about what form reparations might take: a direct tax transfer from whites to blacks? Money straight from a state or federal treasury? The potential problems with any conceivable arrangement are numerous, indeed, and most ought to be obvious, as in, who would get money, and who would pay? Are descendants of Quakers obligated to pay? How about John Brown’s descendants? How about descendants of Union soldiers? Of Confederate soldiers who didn’t own slaves? Should the descendants of Africans who themselves participated in the slave trade have to pay?

Would it have been so difficult for the reporter to have posed these questions, at least? On matters of race in America, we are on extended leave from common sense.

“Articles of War and the Geneva Convention in the prosecution of an illegal aggression?”

Well such convention did not exist during the states.

“Would it have been so difficult for the reporter to have posed these questions, at least?”

Of course it would since doign such may be construed as jourlalisim and nobody getting paid for such actually participates in such today.

“On matters of race in America, we are on extended leave from common sense.”

Such is the state of many items that actually matter to the citizens of the USA today.

Immigration
governance
taxes
social security
national security

the list is rather long.