Congressman Tony Hall of Ohio has proposed that the government of the United States should apologize to black Americans for pre-Civil War slavery. This is an idea easy to ridicule: if you are of mixed racial background, do you have to apologize to yourself? how do you apologize for the dead or to the dead? why stop with the 18th or 19th century? why not have the Normans apologize to the English for the events of 1066? and so on.

Unfortunately the premises--and their consequences--underlying this proposal are not humorous but evil.

1. The proposal seeks to replace individual rights with collectivism. It assumes that a person's value and identity derive only from race, and, that what counts is what some members of your race do--or did two hundred years ago--not what you do as an individual. "The content of your character" evidently does not establish your worth anymore--but your race does.

2. The proposal seeks to replace individual responsibility with collective guilt. It assumes a specialized variety of the Christian concept of original sin: you are born guilty of specific racist actions that occurred before you were born; you must assume the burden of all the acts committed by all of your ancestors and atone for them forever. Because you are guilty you have no right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and you now will be punished. If Congressman Hall is consistent, he should also propose the revival of the old law of throwing children into debtors prison until they pay the bills of their parents.

3. The apology would encourage a culture of "victims" with a permanent claim on government. It discourages individual initiative to build autonomous lives, in favor of passive whining about the unfairness of it all. It ignores the achievements of millions of Americans who have rejected the status of "victims" and built better lives for themselves.

4. The proposal divides society into pressure groups with demands that can't be satisfied. What you get in life, apology proponents want you to believe, should not be based on individual achievement, creativity, or hard work, but on how much pull your group has in redistributing what others produce. Self-appointed leaders of such pressure groups tend to spring up like weeds when the handouts begin.

5. The proposal distorts American history in order to destroy American values. Although the American Revolution was the greatest leap of progress in human history, the Founding Fathers did inherit a civilization with contradictions. They did not invent slavery, but they did wrestle with it. Their achievement was the creation of a system in which slavery could not--and did not--long survive. Posturing and moral exhibitionism come cheap from those who have plenty of courage to look down their noses at slavery from a safe distance of more than a century--much cheaper than the blood of the 600,000 Americans who died in the struggle to end it. If you ask the opponents of the system created by the Founding Fathers what they have in mind to replace it, you might learn that slavery is not as dead as you thought.

6. The proposal detracts from the real task of destroying racism. Racism will be with us as long as collectivism is with us. We will not cure racism short of finding a way to eliminate the collectivist view of human identity. However, we can more easily eliminate governmental racism. This can only be accomplished if government respects the rights and potential dignity of each individual and stops acting as the ward healer collecting the spoils for special interest groups.

Proposals that inflict such massive destruction--as this one would--cannot be completely innocent. (One might even say that such proposals require an apology.) If only our current politicians would apologize for what they are doing to us today--every day! When moral outrage rolls so easily off the tongues of those who spend most of their time aggressively seeking and then desperately retaining political power, the public has grounds for suspicion. The effrontery of such moral midgets attempting to apologize for the likes of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson is obscene. The American public should consign the proposed apology for slavery to the oblivion it deserves, and demand a government that has more regard for the rights of the living than for the dead.

Richard E. Ralston is a former director of development at the Ayn Rand Institute. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.