Along with the difficulties you pointed out in your excellenty article, several others argue against reparations for any rational person:
1. No one alive today had anything to do with slavery.
2. All labor during the antebellum period was was paid by subsistence wages, i.e. food and shelter only — no large amount of money was “stolen” from those blacks
3. Even if a price could be placed on their labor, whatever the total, it was more than spent by the southern landowners who financed and fought the Civil War
4. Who is owed and who would pay is an intractable puzzle (as you pointed out)
5. Slavery was the way of the world since its beginning — it still exists in many parts of the world today
6. Are reparations to be collectd from western African Countries and American blacks descended from the black slavers and profiteers of the time?
7. One million whites died to set American blacks free. Other whites like William Wilberforce spent there entire lives ending the Atlantic slave trade. The entire American abolitionist movement was begun and carried to fruition by a bunch of white New England Christians. Do their descendents need to pay reparations?

Of course, no price can be paid that will erase the degradation, denigration and humiliation visited on these people. Human dignity is priceless. And that’s just the point — nothing can really be done to correct the horrible wrong that was American chattel slavery.

We can attempt to shape political conditions in such a way so that blacks can catch up. I was an early proponent of civil rights and affirmative action plans. However, they soon turned into quotas and a rank racial spoils system so odious I could no longer support them in good conscience. Even Dr. king disliked Jesse Jackson.

Lowering standards is NOT the way to help anyone. In any event, racism is no longer a major problem for blacks. Sure, there will always be the occasional racist, but now blacks are at the mercy of political manipulators who have rendered them violent, dependent and fatherless — and all by design. Believe me, the KKK could not have done more damage to the black race in America than the apologists for why blacks cannot be full participants in the richest country on earth. There is a party which keeps plying the black majority with tales of racism and trumped up outrages like the Trayvon Martin shooting. (Where are these people when 40 black teens a year are shot in places like Chicago?)

No, I would rather spend the money hiring a tutor for every struggling black kid in America. But it will all go for nought. As long as there are political forces at work who must have a near 100% block vote fro blacks to stay politically viable, blacks will continued to be used as pawns by them. And suffer the consequences paid out in short, brutish lives of crime, poverty and early death.