The modern argument for reparations rests on the retroactive application of legal and moral standards that did not exist when slavery was practiced. Slavery in the United States was legal for centuries. Although morally contested, it was not unlawful, and when the institution was abolished, the formerly enslaved were not compensated for their bondage. Their emancipation did not bring financial restitution, nor were slaveholders punished for actions that had been legal under the governing system of the time.

“You must buy this book,” my high school chemistry teacher told me. The book was Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and it predicted doom for the earth and its populations. “The battle to feed humanity is over,” it declared, and mass starvation was both inevitable and imminent.

December 2025 marks the centennial of Pope Pius XI’s 1925 encyclical Quas Primas, which established the feast of Christ the King. Today, this feast is often commemorated by your average, milquetoast clergyman through calls to metaphorically embrace Jesus Christ as king and to have him “reign in our hearts.”

How to Counter Arguments That Taxation Is Legitimate
Dr. David Gordon | Mises Institute Senior Fellow
Sponsored by Jane Shaffer, in Memory of Butler Shaffer

Dr. David Gordon explained why the leading philosophical defenses of taxation—from Rawls’s difference principle to Nagel and Murphy’s “myth of ownership”—collapse, and why natural rights still say taxation is theft.