It looks like the reparations shakedown is coming to the Empire State. If California is any guide, New Yorkers had better hold on to their wallets. Never mind the fact that New York abolished slavery in 1827 and, in the Civil War, fought to end the evil and to preserve the Union. The Coast’s reparations commission recently estimated that California, a free state when it joined the Union, owes its Black residents some $800 billion.

Let us say at the outset that the Sun has long drawn distinctions on this head. We are not against all forms of reparations, particularly if a line can be drawn in court between the enslavement of an individual and the individuals or institutions that did the enslaving. We have, however, long opposed reparations for groups or classes and from whole populations, many of whose individuals had no role in the enslavement in the first place. 

In New York, Speaker Heastie, is already salivating at the prospect of California-like payouts to Democratic voters here. “This is not just about who we’re going to write a check to, and what the amount is,” he claims. Forming a commission in New York, he suggests, “begins the conversation.” Governor Hochul, signing the bill to form the panel, laments that slavery wasn’t only a “product of the South” and “our state also flourished from that slavery.”

No doubt New York had a pro-slavery element. We’re not here to belittle it. Slavery did exist in New York. In 1790, enslaved persons totaled 6 percent of the state’s population of 340,120 people. The number of slaves, though, was, as the Gilder Lehman Institute puts it, “minuscule compared to the number held in the South,” where roughly a third of the population was in bondage. Plus, too, New York in 1799 imposed a gradual abolition law.

By 1830 only 75 slaves resided in New York. By 1840 there were none. This history suggests that the reparations campaign in the state is likely to focus on how banks, Wall Street, insurance, and other deep-pocketed financial concerns can be tapped for payouts. What New York’s commission aims to weigh, the AP reports, is how the state “engaged in the transfer of enslaved Africans.” That points to a long and complex process in the coming years. 

It’s a moment to remember, among other parts of the history, that some half a million New Yorkers fought to preserve the Union in the Civil War, and tens of thousands of them died. The Senate Republican leader, Rob Ortt, says “reparations of slavery were paid with the blood and lives” of those New Yorkers. Yet Ms. Hochul now urges the state to “rebuke — and not excuse — our role in benefiting from the institution of slavery.” 

This is code for going after the corporations, or their successors, that did antebellum business with slave states. Insurance firms like New York Life, AIG, and Aetna, are on the hook, the BBC reports, along with banks like JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. Reparations backers likely see such companies as cash cows, especially since even the New York Times concedes New York’s “budget issues” stand in the way of big payouts by the state. 

Yet California’s yawning deficit didn’t stop the reparations panel there from envisioning payments of $1.2 million per Black resident. How did it arrive at that figure, since slavery was never legal there? The panel’s sages, AP reports, decided that “the state was responsible” not for slavery, but for liberal bêtes noires of the 20th century, including “decades of over-policing,” plus “redlining” policies which, activists contend, harmed Black families.

Count on New York’s panel to resort to similar contortions. The best way to defy the legacy of slavery and racism is to fix the state’s public education system, restore public safety, and strengthen free enterprise by cutting taxes and regulations. That prosperity agenda runs crosswise to the modus operandi of today’s Democratic party, which would rather sap taxpayers and businesses to fund handouts to their constituents. It’s a good issue for the GOP, now as then.