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Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

Person A stabbed person B possibly hundreds of years ago. Now because C lives where A did, he owes D money. Oh, and B originally acquired his possessions stabbing someone else, but he's somehow virtuous because of C has to feel guilty about everything A did.

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Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It just makes this place worse. At least the Malcolm X quote (for those of us who'd not heard it before) is interesting.

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If A's stabbing of B causally led to B's descendants being poor and B's descendants being rich, then we should obviously transfer some wealth from A's descendants to B's descendants. That's just good economic/political incentive design.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not claiming anything about this Dutch case, I'm just playing along with your contrived example.

What happens if B got their money by being so effective at stabbing that after stabbing Z, they got Z's money and Z had no descendants? You can't give B's money back to Z's descendents, but you can't give A's money back to B without treating B's genocide more kindly than A's oppression.

You would struggle to establish that "A's stabbing of B causally led to B's descendants being poor". It's not enough to argue that A stabbed B and B is now poor therefore A caused B's poverty, which would be a post hoc fallacy.

I'm pretty sure you posted this after my edit, but in case you didn't, please read that. I'm not the one that came up with this contrived "A stabs B" example, and I never claimed that "for any A that stabs B, then B is causally at a financial disadvantage in the future" (though I would claim this effect in the real world, on average, but that's off topic).

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