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I disagree!
Although the Declaration of Independence is not a document with any legal force nowadays, I deem it a good marker of what the best Enlightenment thinking of the time was going for. They really did believe that God made man equal. But God has evaporated from the public commons, and we're left with the equality.
I have met many liberals who say that if we only committed more national resources to welfarism, we'd emerge in the promised land. Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary? Is that the 'huge effort' you refer to? If not, then how much money exactly should go into patching up the liberal project, into perpetuity?
All of my mainstream American education growing up never conceived of equality in the way you’re suggesting. It was always in the sense of “equally subject to and deserving of the protections of the rule of law” or something along those lines. Maybe they actually meant something else but I’m pretty faithfully representing how American Liberalism is explained in mainstream American primary education.
No, because I am not committed to the notion of equality you are putting forward. And my views are pretty representative of American liberals (not progressives, who are the ones pushing for reparations). However if, counterfactually, liberals were more committed to the kind of equality you’re describing, then sure, it seems like big enough reparations would definitionally be big enough lol
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I'm fairly sure they did not mean "equal in ability".
You and Teddy Roosevelt, in his famous "Man in the Arena" speech (although that might have been the part where he was quoting ol' Honest Abe).
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