Cory “Spartacus” Booker, the presidential candidate, who made a nickname for himself during the Senate confirmation hearing for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has recently introduced a Senate bill that would study the possibility of reparations for the descendants of slaves. A similar bill was also introduced in the House.

According to Booker, “this bill is a way of addressing head-on the persistence of racism, white supremacy, and implicit racial bias in our country. It will bring together the best minds to study the issue and propose solutions that will finally begin to right the economic scales of past harms and make sure we are a country where all dignity and humanity is affirmed.”

With all respect to Mr. Booker, reparations are a no good, very bad idea. The entirety of continental Europe in the early 20thcentury would agree.

The first-time monetary reparations were imposed on a country it did not go well. At the end of World War I, the Allied powers decided to use the impetus of victory to force Germany into submission. They did this by taking land away from the Axis power and forcing the country to pay the victors to help them rebuild their countries and economies. The belief that Germany was the cause of the war, and France’s desire to curb the future possibility of German aggression, led to the enforcement of the payments. It was an unmitigated disaster that led to a Second World War where 60 million people lost their lives.

The first problem is that Germany didn’t exactly have the money, the desire or the labor force to make the payments. In fact, after the war the government was deeply fractured, with a large group of disenfranchised service men looking for a cause, and remained without clear leadership. The frustration of citizens over the payments helped fuel dissention, and soon alternative movements began to grow.

This was especially evident in Munich where Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were able to gather large crowds in local beer halls across the city. Hitler actually argued that the reparations were essentially a “‘slavery’ imposed on Germans by the Allied reparations,” according to German historian Ian Kershaw. It is extremely likely that if reparations were placed on Americans to repay the descendants of slaves it would do absolutely nothing to alleviate racism, instead it would inflame tensions even further and unity would never be achieved.

There is also the likelihood that reparations would depress the American economy like it did to the German economy. Although the reparations were established in 1919, by 1922 Germany had only made one full quarter payment, and soon Germany wasn’t making any at all. The country eventually descended into an economic depression, as did most of the world, and astronomical inflation, which resulted in currency being used as wallpaper and as building blocks for children. Americans would possibly experience something similar and will not “right the economic scales” in the long run. When the economy is bad, the majority of people suffer so the financial windfall would be short lived.

Finally, perhaps the biggest problem with just the idea of reparations is that it will lead to bigger divisions and likely result in extreme political movements. Again, take Germany as an example. The Holocaust likely would not have happened without the Allied reparations, which gave Hitler and other Germans the opportunity to blame a group of people for their economic and political problems. The deaths of millions of people, 6 million Jews in particular, would not have happened if different decisions had been made.

Reparations are always a bad idea. The Allied forces found this out the hard way, and as a result approached the end of World War II very differently. Instead of forcing Germany and Japan to pay for damages, the U.S. helped rebuild both countries and they remain strong allies and economic partners to this day. As a result the world has remained relatively peaceful for 80 years.