Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, there are a couple of articles in The Wall Street Journal. One on the January 6, Notable Quotables on the lockdown. The first sentence is first, the United States never had lockdowns, not like elsewhere in the world, at least. And then the whole article is about how we didn’t have lockdowns. And so this is written by a fellow, let’s see, his name is Davis Wallace-Wells.
When somebody says we didn’t have lockdowns, what that translates into is I personally wasn’t particularly inconvenienced by the terrible things that the government did to a whole bunch of other people. But since it didn’t really affect me that much, we didn’t have it for anybody.
And then he goes on to compare it to China. And I thought about this as a technique to make an argument. The argument is to find a worse example than the one you’re talking about and say, see there? We weren’t as bad as they were, therefore we weren’t bad at all. That’s kind of the argument here. And that’s the same way Biden has treated the economy.
Argentina’s inflation rate is 100 percent. Ours is not nearly as bad as Argentina’s, therefore I’m doing a great job. And now he doesn’t get to say that when it comes to our open borders because there are no countries in the world that have open borders like ours. So he just says it’s not happening.
And our media goes along with this whole thing. There’s a second and to me, kind of a related article, and this one is written by Thomas Duesterberg and it’s actually a very straightforward article. The headline is: China’s Myth of Communist Competence.
Now, you hear an awful lot of people in this country who are on the left and I’m not going to say they’re just aggressive leftists only, but certainly the very left believes that the Communist Party is the way to govern a society, especially if they get to be the Communists.
But the sub-headline is: Xi Jinping was preparing to dominate the globe. Instead he faces one crisis after another at home. And that second statement I believe to be true. He’s got all kinds of economic problems. He’s got a lot of social unrest. And when you consider how communism works, here’s what people on the Left do not understand.
And this is not because they are necessarily mean, terrible people. It’s because they truly are ignorant about the nature of free market capitalism, especially how essential it is to innovation. And this is the problem that China has.
The Communist Party allocates capital, which is why they have such a terrible real estate problem in China because they’ve been allocating about 30 percent of their economy to housing for the last 20 years, maybe even longer than that. But certainly the last 20.
And now they have a terrible amount of unbuilt unfinished apartments unpaid for, and they’ve got all kinds of issues there. But what communism does is it allocates capital as the hierarchy sees fit. Innovation, by its very nature, comes from individuals who see something that nobody else, literally nobody else sees, and then they work on it.
They find people who have money who are willing to back their vision, even though the vision is very, very risky. Because if, in fact, their vision turns out to be accurate, the people who back the vision end up doing very well.
They might end up losing 100 percent of their money if the visionary turns out not to be correct. But in China, you’re not allowed to do that. In the US. So far, you still are allowed to do that. And so when I compare these two articles, it’s interesting to me that on one hand, you have this guy, Davis Wallace-Wells, who is claiming that the lockdowns that we actually had and affected our children especially dramatically, it wiped out millions of people’s jobs.
But for him, he’s saying they weren’t awful because they weren’t as bad as the ones in China. Then I read the next article about China and what a mess they are in now. And it’s just kind of the irony of those two articles I found to be quite interesting.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “The Wall Street Journal” by Jennifer Feuchter. CC BY 2.0.
