CO City Council Member Proposes Tax for White-Owned Businesses as Reparations.

Colorado Councilwoman Proposes Reparations for Non-White Business Owners

Businesses sometimes struggle. But Denver City Council member Candi CdeBaca suspects that isn’t the case for Caucasians. A dastardly disparity is afoot; fortunately, she’s found a fix.

Capitalism vs. Socialism

At a recent forum, Candi made a sizable assertion about capitalism. While capitalism concerns many small businesses, socialism involves the ultimate big business: government. Under socialism, politicians take charge of all products and means of production. Despite the above, Candi claims capitalism is “built.” Additionally, liberty is a thief: “Capitalism was built on stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen resources.”

Reparations for Non-White Business Owners

Candi believes that the ability to launch one’s own enterprise has resulted in racist harm. Therefore, we must “undo the cumulative impact of generations of that stolen wealth in all of those categories.” She proposes reparations in the form of land, labor, and resources in an ongoing fashion. Within Denver’s economically-depressed Five Points neighborhood sits a “business improvement district.” Candi sees an opportunity to balance justice’s scales. Though she labels taxation as theft, she’s pushing for more taxation. To elevate nonwhites, a lowering of melanin-deficient industrialists hits the spot. And anti-capitalist Candi is pro-capitalism when the owners aren’t Aryan.

• Instead of the BID collecting extra taxation from the black and brown businesses that are struggling, you could be collecting those extra taxes from white-led businesses all over the city and redistributing them to black- and brown-owned businesses who are not part of the BID, or who are simply just black- or brown-owned.

Candi wants nonwhites granted a living wage — and not just some merely-making-it amount. “The basic income project could be…an important way that we turn a check to an individual in an ongoing fashion. … we need to go far beyond welfare wages and go to prosperous wages because we don’t want to just survive anymore.”

She’s all about personal ownership — somehow, via government ownership: “I think when we talk about resources being returned, this is where consumer-owned or municipally-own resources are important — because we are locked out of owning or control over our basic needs like water or utilities or any of those things. There is a way for us to change that structure and put black and brown people in ownership positions over our basic needs.”

Candi’s long been keen on socialism and communism. When she ran for City Council in 2019, she explained as follows: “I think…we’re in late-phase capitalism and we know it doesn’t work. …  [W]e have to move into something new, and I believe in community ownership of land, labor, resources and distribution of those resources. And whatever that morphs into is…what will serve community the best. And I’m excited to usher it in by any means necessary.”

“By any means necessary” is quite the commitment. Evidently, one of those means is being a racial Robin Hood.

What do you think about Candi’s proposal? Share your thoughts in the comments below.