the Mail.

While I largely agree with Karl Zinsmeister's conclusions about slavery reparations (Bird's Eye, July/August 2001), one of his important arguments seems faulty to me: "Trying to pay slave reparations in our decade would, as one observer put it, mostly be a case of individuals who were never slaveholders giving money to people who were never slaves. A clear absurdity."

Reparations would only be an absurdity if we construe them as payments from individuals to other individuals. But the point of any payments would be that the United States as a nation is making amends to African Americans as a people.

Reparations should be seen as a symbolic gesture of regret by this nation toward a people it has oppressed. What an appropriate form for these reparations could be is anyone's guess, but that can be worked out in the political arena.

Mr. Zinsmeister's argument that we have already paid this debt through the blood of the Civil War is stronger, and was indeed made by Lincoln himself. But if we can today, in some more conscious way, express our regret for past wrongs, and signal our intention to address present injustices, surely we should do so.

Kevin R. Johnson Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

This missive is prompted by Jennifer Roback Morse's "The Moral Roots of Liberty and Prosperity," with Rabbi Daniel Lapin's addendum thereto (July/August 2001).

While free enterprise, property rights, reduction and elimination of onerous taxes, and getting rid of the tens of thousands of utterly stupid restrictive rules and regulations and environmental strictures are all very important, they are meaningless unless combined with a restoration of freedom of religion, moral absolutes, personal responsibility, and honor.