The demands of African-Americans for redress from slavery are a political matter, because they threaten the unity of the nation, and so their demands must be addressed in some manner. They’re already here and we can’t escape that fact. You cannot just command, by personal preference, that the African-American nation instantly disappears into the melting pot. It can’t, hasn’t and won’t happen.
As long as these demands carry with themselves the slightest chance of getting profits from the rest of America merely on the face of such a demand, they will never cease, at least not for long. Freedom and citizenship in quite an immigration magnet country didn't satisfy it (quite a boon, relative to the fates of slave populations in most other places), even though it was paid for with blood of already free Americans.
Civil rights didn't. The economic generosity of "Great Society" didn't.
Whatever idea you have, you can expect the next generation, or the one after it, not remember that redress, it being either taken for granted or squandered by most families, get reminded of the opportunity of getting something valuable merely for complaining, and continuing that scheme. They will have no reason not to, because there is no price on trying. The mere possibility is a temptation that's hard to resist, because it is a free lottery ticket. Would you throw it away? You either win nothing, or you win something, and regardless of that, you get another ticket in next few decades.
The "melting pot" idea worked when it worked and as it worked - right now, everyone knows that America has no intention of being a united society and culture - ask white liberal arts professors and lumber town blue collar workers about their cultures. Both represent some kind of culture that one would call American, but it doesn't take a sociologist to say that this is not the same culture, neither of them feels like assimilating to the other one, and neither can be claimed as immigrants that can be required to assimilate. The rest needs to be handled by federalism, good governance, and "live and let live" principles. Which also includes different groups having different outcomes in various aspects of life and not expecting the government to come and "equalize" them if they aren't happy with theirs.
I want to break the wheel. Relocating distressed urban populations to abandoned farmland has worked in the past in other nations, and hasn’t been tried yet in this case on a scale serious enough to succeed. And, if our Republic is going to survive at all, we need to reinvigorate Jefferson’s agrarian civil society. This is probably the “least worst” government intervention to address the African-American population.
Its a noble idea and good at its time, but pure fantasy in current time and current USA. And not just for political reasons, but for mere macroeconomic ones.
Namely, there isn't enough farmland to create an agrarian civil society with either the numbers or the money to counterweight the urban populations in either more than they already do - and on top of that, the remaining urban populations African-American will care about as much about "their" representatives in "agrarian civil society" as the mentioned white liberal arts professors care about the opinions of white rural folk.
Why isn't there enough farmland? Its pretty simple. According to
this, there are about 900 million acres of farmland in USA.
Lets take this as a sort of approximate yardstick for the economics of small farms:
It is a study of minimum land needed to achieve certain income level for a small farm with various sets of circumstances.
Its pretty old, so lets rescale the highest option, 6000$ in 1969, to modern USD - its a factor of about 7.1, yielding 42600$. Seems like an appropriate minimum target income for a family of "agrarian civil society" in a cheap, rural region. According to the study, this requires almost 500 acres. You could say there was a lot of advancement in agricultural technology since 1969, so lets be optimistic and make it 200.
Lets ignore all the annoying details of talents, incentives, abilities, land redistribution, competing with large farms national and international on economy of scale, and so on, and lets see how many families can possibly do it.
900 million acres divided by 200 gives us 2.25 million families able to live solely out of their own farming business. 10-15 million people. Some chunk of that potential number already exists, and the rest would necessarily live in roughly the same geographical area.
Even if you squeezed down the farms to 100 acres and increased the total farmland by half through marginal land use, you would still have 6.75 million families, including almost a tenth of US population. And that's a very optimistic number.
Long story short, this isn't a feasible way to revolutionize social dynamics across the country.
The closest feasible thing i could imagine working that is similar to this idea, is to keep the spirit rather than the letter of the idea, and expand this ideal of society to all forms of businesses operated by the owner with the help of family and maybye few hired workers.
Namely, small businesses. There's almost 32 million of them already (and fun
fact, almost 2/3 of their owners are fine with Trump).
Some would own more than one per family, but still, you start with the number that's several times above the highly optimistic maximum for the farm option, and the theoretical maximum for that one is far higher.
If by some combination of squeezing big business, incentives and reforms you could double that, there would be a small business per every 6 people in USA, and not accounting for variances, a 3 generational family with 2 children per generation would be statistically highly likely to own a business.
So the situation is still salvageable. Macron will need to institute reforms to turn things around. Any ideas what to suggest?
EU delenda est. Thats a necessary, but far from sufficient part. With such a bureaucratic colossus highly intertwined into every smallest aspect of agriculture, pushing through good reforms would be practically impossible.