OPINION:
US Attorney David Weiss of Delaware is accused of intentionally letting the statute of limitations expire because Hunter Biden failed to pay his taxes in full for 2014 and 2015. If true, it is further evidence of significant corruption in the Justice Department.
The belief that action by prosecutors or others who might be entitled to redress against those accused of having committed an illegal act must be taken within a certain period of time dates back at least to the ancient Greeks.
The Romans codified statutes of limitations, among other things, and many of these Roman laws were incorporated into English common law. In the centuries after 1600, the British built their empire on the basis of their common law, used in part by perhaps half the world’s population and serving as the legal basis for much of global civil society.
Individual jurisdictions—countries, states, and localities—have established statutes of limitations for both misdemeanors and felonies. There are some exceptions, such as murder. When it comes to tax violations, there are often relatively short periods of time in which the authorities can bring charges, reflecting the problems of dwindling memory, record keeping and the ever-changing complexity of tax laws.
Unlike in some communist countries, crimes that “reaches beyond the grave” are not prosecuted with good reason. That the sins of the father should not be passed on to the son is a belief that most civilized societies have practiced for thousands of years.
From time to time the movement for “redress” for wrongs done to a particular group is revived, as is happening in California and the city of San Francisco. The argument is that some Americans whose ancestors were slaves continued to suffer from this legacy even though slaves were freed in America some 160 years ago.
While this argument has merit, there are persistent problems in determining which living Americans are the real victims and who among living Americans bears responsibility for the actions of their ancestors or the ancestors of others.
At the start of the Civil War, there were fewer than four million slaves and 31 million white Americans, only a tiny minority of whom were slave owners. There are currently approximately 335 million Americans, of whom 45 million identify as Black, 250 million are White, and the remainder identify as Asian, Native American, or mixed race.
The vast majority of white, black, and mixed-race Americans have ancestors who came after the abolition of slavery, and there is no practical way to determine how much “slave blood” or “slave owner blood” an American has—so who should receive reparation and who should pay is intractable.
The legacy of former President Barack Obama illustrates the problem. Some of his white mother’s ancestors are said to have been slave owners, and some of his African father’s ancestors are said to have been black slave owners.
Slavery was the world norm from well before antiquity until about 300 years ago. It was practiced everywhere – in China, India, Africa, Europe and among the Indians of the Americas. The Portuguese began taking black Africans as slaves to their new, far-flung colonies, including Brazil. For the most part, it was African slave owners who sold their slaves to white Europeans. Nobody was pure in this shabby business.
It was Britain, after centuries of the slave trade, that experienced the moral awakening that slavery was wrong in the mid-18th century, and it was the first major nation to outlaw the slave trade in 1807 and freed slaves in their colonies in 1838.
Some argue the change in attitudes was due to Enlightenment philosophers, the rise of Protestant sects with an emphasis on individual responsibility, and new technologies such as the steam engine that reduced the need for unskilled manual labor. All of them probably played a role.
When George Washington was a young man, slavery was the world norm – and like almost everyone in his and previous generations, he accepted it. From his own letters we know that, like many of his contemporaries, he changed his mind and, towards the end of his life, focused both on freeing his own slaves and ending the institution, which he increasingly saw as morally wrong and economically destructive.
There are those who judge the actions of past leaders by today’s standards, but fail to recognize how quickly “accepted” attitudes and practices can change. It has only been a century since most women gained the right to vote, and same-sex marriage has only been widely accepted in the last decade.
The constitutional scholar Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School wrote in a 2004 article:
“Efforts to prioritize reparations ignore that time has shifted the focus of our current concerns to a new set of problems that cannot be resolved by reliving the horrors of an early generation in any collective or official capacity.” We must live life into the future. We cannot collectively right the wrongs suffered in the past. But we can cause new and unnecessary hurt by trying to right past wrongs. A divisive campaign for redress will undermine the efforts we all aspire to create a stronger, more vital, productive and caring nation.”
• Richard W. Rahn is Chair of the Institute for Global Economic Growth and MCon LLC.
