One lesson, we inherit complex worlds -- we work at corporations with dark histories, attend institutions built by slaves, use devices and wear clothes made by people who live their lives in horrid conditions.
Maybe we can't change that, but maybe we owe ourselves the human responsibility to grapple with those questions.
> But by 1847, insurance policies on slaves accounted for a third of the policies in a firm that would become one of the nation’s Fortune 100 companies
rather than the part of the article that actually mentioned income, namely this:
> Its foray into the slave insurance business did not prove to be lucrative: The company ended up paying out nearly as much in death claims — about $232,000 in today’s dollars — as it received in annual payments
?
Spoiler: this is where a solid libertarian argument for universal basic income begins. Since we know just about every distribution of property/wealth in the present day traces back to a use of force or fraud in the recorded past, but just about everybody has cause against someone, it would be impossible to equitably settle every case individually in order to create a clean slate on which to build a libertarian society. It would also be impossible to just declare "libertarianism, starting right now" and lock in the current known-inequitable distributions of wealth and property. Adding a universal basic income, given to everyone and funded by taxation of everyone, offers a way around this conundrum.
And there's no immutable law of nature that says a universal basic income would excuse any current or future disputes regarding equality, justice, and fairness. Indeed, UBI could even exacerbate feelings of unfairness in myriad, unpredictable ways.
The fundamental issue is that concepts like equality, justice, and fairness are highly dynamic and often far removed from most objective measurements of well-being.
That's not a critique against those concepts. Our need to feel treated "fairly" is innate. But the reality is extremely messy. The meaning of "fair" is constantly evolving, from the perspective of each individual, each community, and society-wide. And it rarely if ever means the same thing to any two people or groups, and hardly ever means the same thing to the same person across time or other context.
White supremacy didn't go home just because a few people put their signatures on the Civil Rights Act.
We definitely don't need a culture of victimhood where anyone with documented ties to the past gets vilified.