When the EPA finds out that a corporation saved costs by illegally disposing of its wastes, the Agency calculates the cost of what they should have spent, adds a stipulated penalty and the cost of any environmental restoration the violations might have caused, and then forces the company to pay what they owe.
When the IRS discovers that a taxpayer tried to save money by underpaying his taxes, they calculate what should have been paid, adds fines and penalties, and makes the person or corporation pay up, garnishing wages if necessary.
When the Department of Labor is told that someone increased their personal profit by criminally underpaying their workers, the cheapskates are forced to pay the back salaries owed, and if the workers can't be identified, sometimes the payments are made to a trust fund or NGO that benefits the underpaid.
But when it's pointed out that slave owners made their substantial fortunes by not paying the involuntarily enslaved while also subjecting those enslaved persons to horrifying deprivations and cruelty, the nation's reaction is generally, "Well, what can you do?"
To illustrate my point that something is owed, imagine for a minute that you're Isaiah D. Hart. It's 1850, the Civil War hasn't yet started (for the record, you're against secession, recognizing that it's bad for business), and you own a 2,000-acre plantation west of Jacksonville, Florida named "Paradise." On that plantation, you own 57 slaves.
Your slaves aren't paid any salary. You incur some cost associated with housing and feeding them, as well as policing them and recovering fugitives, but compared to the rest of the costs of maintaining a 2,000-acre plantation, that cost is effectively zero. Plus, you can breed the slaves and sell the young and the women to help offset costs. It might even be its own profit center.
This free pool of labor harvests your cotton, irrigates your fields, plants your seed, and constructs your buildings. You soon amass a small fortune and become one of the wealthiest men in Florida, due in part to your business acumen (I'll grant you that) but also because you were able to keep your labor costs down to an effective zero.
How much should have been paid for that labor? What is it that Isaiah should have paid? According to a January 1942 article in W.E.B. DuBois' magazine The Crisis (the official magazine of the NAACP) titled Negro Labor in Jacksonville by Samuel Harper, "Back in 1886 Negro bricklayers labored hard and worked 10 hours a day at the rate of twenty-five cents per hour." The 1886 wage for bricklayers may not be exactly correlative to the value of labor in the cotton fields in 1850, but it's a starting point. If you have a better value, please let me know.
Interestingly, 25¢ an hour in 1850, adjusting for inflation, is equivalent in purchasing power to $8.22 in 2020. Today, the minimum wage is $7.25, although it's widely recognized that the rate should be closer to a living wage of $15/hour. My point is that $8.22/hour is a not an unreasonable rate for important but unskilled labor, and I'll use it for a first-order approximation of what Isaiah should have paid.
A slave worked long hours each day. According to the University of Houston, a slave on a typical plantation worked ten or more hours a day, six days a week. At planting or harvest time, planters required slaves to stay in the fields 15 or 16 hours a day. But for our first-order approximation, let's conservatively assume 10 hours a day, six days a week, or 60 hours per week (3,120 hours per year).
Isaiah purchased his so-called Paradise in the mid-1830s and operated it until his death in 1861. Let's assume that's 25 years of slave labor, 3,120 hours per year, at $8.22 per hour. That means that he should have paid $641,160 per slave. Since he is reported to have had 57 slaves, that totals $36,546,120.
I think a lot of businesses today would be interested in learning how they could reduce their expenses by $36.5 million dollars (although today, most - but not all - businesses would draw the line at slavery).
Isaiah Hart became one of the richest men in Florida because he got $36.5M worth of free labor. If he had to pay that, his business acumen may still have made him a rich man, but he didn't pay what he should have and his fortune was made due to workers who suffered slavery in his fields.
Also, before all you smug Yankees think it was only a Southern plantation owner who profited, northern textile mills in New England bought Isaiah's cotton at a reduced cost due to the free labor, and realized a greater profit than they should have otherwise. I'll leave it to others to calculate what the textile mills owe, and to whom they owe it. I can also take it a step further, and point out that Yankee consumers bought their seersucker suits and gingham dresses at a reduced cost, since the textile mills were buying their cotton at a reduced rate. Everyone "wins," except for the unpaid labor in the field and their descendants, who were "rewarded" with 170 years of racial bias, Jim Crow discrimination, redlining, and the not infrequent lynching.
So, reparations. Fifty-seven men and women performed hard labor to amass Isaiah Hart's fortune and went unrewarded. Isaiah Hart realized his fortune largely because he didn't have to pay for labor. But who, this 170 years later, should pay the cost? And who, this 170 years later, should get the payment?
And what about the textile mills and the consumers?
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