Crom’s Crommentary: The Wall Street Journal Gets It Right—The 1619 Project on Hulu Vindicates Capitalism
Live from Music Row, Wednesday 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 in studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, there was a great column in The Wall Street Journal Headline: The 1916 Project on Hulu Vindicates Capitalism. And what the article points out. If you think about what The 1619 Project alleges, it alleges certain things that are false, but it also says certain things that are actually factually true.
And if you think about what they claim to be factually true supports their side, it actually doesn’t. So let me give you a few examples that are cited in this article. I’m doing some quotes here throughout the commentary. The article starts by saying the series gives many examples of government intervention that undercuts free markets and property rights.
Eminent domain, racial redlining on mortgages, and government support and enforcement of union monopolies figure prominently, and this is in The 1619 Project’s Hulu documentary. The final episode opens by telling how the federal government forcibly evicted black residents of Harris Neck, Georgia during World War II to build a military base. The army gave residents three weeks to relocate before bulldozers moved in.
After the war, the government refused to let the former residents return. Violating their property rights is the opposite of market capitalism. And this was by the way, under FDR. The federal government took a whole bunch of black people in Georgia and just told them got three weeks to get out of there.
And then after the war was over, they wouldn’t give them their property back. That is the government doing that to black people, not the free market. The series also highlights the noxious role of the FHA in redlining. The FHA discriminates against minority neighborhoods by classifying them as too hazardous for lending.
The writers could have strengthened their case by citing Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book The Color of Law. And in that book, he points out that in the 1930s, once again, under FDR and the completely Democrat-controlled federal government, the FHA redlined and would not let private lenders with any federal support at all loan money into areas that were black neighborhoods.
Economic historians have long known about discrimination against white-only labor unions. Jimmy Carter’s Labor Secretary, Ray Marshall, a labor economist, chronicled the discrimination in his academic work. The Wagner Act of 1935, once again, FDR and the Democrats gave white unions bargaining power under federal law over unions that were mixed, black unions, or black-owned companies were discriminated against.
The series recognizes the discriminatory effects of FDR’s legislative agenda once again government, which depended on the Democrat machine that operated in the Jim Crow South. The narrator states that the New Deal represented the first affirmative action policies for white people. We couldn’t have said that better, is what the story says now.
But the point of all this is that even with all of this evidence showing that the true discrimination against black people is always institutional in the form of government policy that hurts black people, we can move forward to today and look at our educational system and how black children are forced to go to terrible schools, these are in Democrat control cities, usually in Democrat control states, and under federal policy. And under Biden, it’s getting worse by the day.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Photo “Wall Street Journal Sign” by BrokenSphere. CC BY 3.0.
