Karl Zinsmeister

Karl Zinsmeister is editor-in-chief of American Enterprise and has written opinion pieces for the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. In the following viewpoint, he discusses why he feels the slavery- reparations movement—which holds that the federal government should make monetary payments to the black Americans for the harms caused by slavery—is misguided. Zinsmeister believes that the U.S. government made a mistake in not giving newly freed slaves land or other means of supporting themselves in the decade following the Civil War, but that any effort to make up for that mistake in the twenty-first century would be fraught with practical and moral complications. Further, he asserts that the United States has made significant restitution to...