Live from Music Row Friday 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.
At the end of the second hour, Carmichael discussed the growing cancel culture in America and makes comparisons of Hitler’s rise to power and the French Revolution.
Leahy: Crom Carmichael is in studio with us. Crom, we are talking about cancel culture. It’s all over the place. It’s not a good thing and it seems to be growing.
Carmichael: And the cancel culture here that I’m talking about is what’s so discouraging and quite frightening about it is that a lot of these are over issues that even the Left shouldn’t have a problem debating. If you say just the slightest thing that’s wrong. The reason this is so important is that this is exactly what happened in Germany during the rise of Hitler.
And as it got closer to him becoming chancellor the people who disagreed with Hitler paid terrible prices. They were beaten. Some were killed. After he became chancellor he wiped out his opposition. If you had been somebody that spoke up against Hitler…
Leahy: But, the people on the Left Crom they would never do something like that here in America.
Carmichael: There are some people on the Left who would never do something like that but there are other people on the Left that will. In fact, using another time in history with the French Revolution, the people who led the revolution ended up getting killed by the mob. Because once the mob goes crazy and in the case of France the mob went crazy on every side.
There was no Hitler in France until Bonaparte came along 10 years later. So in France, you had chaos. And by the way, the economy was bad in France, to begin with when the French Revolution in 1789 the economy was bad. And for the next 10 years, the French Revolution shrunk the French economy from a terrible economy, which by the way, our Depression was better than the economy in France in 1789. Their economy shrunk by 50 percent. From that point over the next 10 years. And so that’s what happens when mob psychology takes over and extinguished. So this guy writes this column named Walter Black.
Leahy: He’s a professor at Loyola University at New Orleans.
Carmichael: He writes an article back in December and then he wrote another on in July. The one in July is where he argued that there is a side of slavery that is immoral. But then he reaches that by redefining slavery. My argument with him is he’s just changed the definition of slavery to try to make a point.
If you voluntarily agree to slavery then it’s not slavery. In other words, slavery starts with involuntary servitude. It starts with that. So anything else is not slavery by definition. Then he gets into good capitalism versus bad capitalism and good socialism versus bad. He says, here are the two forms of socialism.
One is voluntary. This plays off slavery. One is voluntary socialism and the other is involuntary socialism. He said the version that’s calling for government ownership and control of all means of production the complete nationalization of all industries then yes socialism is a work of the devil.
That socialism is the work of the devil. The complete control by the central government. But then he tries to claim that if you enter into voluntary socialism by the voters then it’s ok for the government to expropriate the property of anybody that the voters choose to. But here’s what’s wrong with that argument.
What is wrong with that argument is that the way he is describing it as if a mob of people chooses to vote to take everything Jeff Bezos owns as long as it’s voted on by the majority of the people than its moral. Even if Jeff Bezos voted against it. Well, that’s not voluntary.
If we are going to get into the moral implications of law and taxation than it has to be where I’m voting for something that applies to me that is equal to what I want to apply to others. By the way, that’s our system in Tennessee. That is our system in Tennessee because we have at the state level we have a sales tax.
And that sales tax applies the same to everybody on a sales taxable item. And at the local level, we have the property tax. And the property tax is the rate that applies the same. If you have a piece of property that is 10 times more valuable than somebody else’s then you are going to pay 10 times more in taxes. But you’re not going to pay 100 times more in taxes. It’s really interesting because it all depends on your definitions. In the case of Chris Wallace…
Leahy: Fox News.
Carmichael: Fox News on WWII and on the dropping of the two bombs. The way that he described it and the way his body language was it was not good.
Leahy: Morally wrong.
Carmichael: It was morally wrong that Truman killed over 100,000 civilians in two days. That that was wrong. But he then goes on in the story and says that during that very same war 47 million. And it’s as if those 47 million aren’t the same as these 100,000.
Leahy: And not to re-litigate the famous Truman decision to drop the bomb, but the counter-argument to that is the alternative to win the war was an invasion of Japan by our military forces. Which most experts thought would end up in probably a million deaths of combatants on each side.
Carmichael: On each side. Yes, combatants but that doesn’t count the civilians.
Leahy: I do want to close with this. It seems to me Crom that we are at a point in history now in America that Alexis de Tocqueville warned us about in the 1830s when he traveled around the United States during the Jacksonian presidency. He said we have to be careful of the tyranny of a majority. And this is what the mob is. It’s a tyranny of the majority and it crushes individual liberty.
Carmichael: And that’s also what the Founding Fathers tried to organize in our Constitution to protect us against it. That’s why Ben Franklin said…
Leahy: You have a republic if you can keep it. Perhaps the most important words ever said about America. A republic if you can keep it.
Listen to the second hour here:
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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.
