From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

An affirmative action is essentially a kind of tax that consumers pay that acts as reparations to black employees, and it's been going on for 50 years.

This is your host, Scott Bertram, and that's Dr. Paul Marino, chair in constitutional history,

professor of history, and dean of social sciences at Hillsdale College.

We'll talk today about a piece he wrote recently for Real Clear Policy entitled

50 Years of Reparations.

Dr. Marino, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for me on the show.

Talking with you about this piece you wrote recently for Real Clear Policy,

at Real Clear Policy.com, 50 years of reparations.

And this deals with the revived discussion of reparations for slavery and segregation.

The House, in fact, passed a bill or advanced a bill recently to form a committee on reparations.

You say at the start here, and we'll return to this, but you argue we've had reparations in the form of

affirmative action for the past half century for 50 years.

I want to come back to that.

But first, I want to talk about the history of affirmative action.

Where does that term even originate? Well, it actually came about first in the National Labor

Relations Act, the Wagner Act, which was an anti-discrimination law in itself. It was made it

illegal to discriminate against labor organizers or labor union members. And if an employer did that, he would be

forced to reinstate the employee, give him back pay, and any other, quote, unquote, affirmative action

that the board might require. That could be things like posting notices in the workplace that you

were free to unionize, you know, doing something for the labor organization. But that was up to the administrative body.

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