All posts by Joel Schlosberg

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Time to Drop Hamilton’s Economics

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Review of that other Broadway play about Hamilton in The Washington Times, September 10, 1917. Public domain.

The July 3 premiere of Hamilton on streaming service Disney+ marked the end of a five-year wait for audiences who hadn’t seen the hit musical on stage.

Alexander Hamilton’s rivals in Hamilton concede that he “doesn’t get enough credit for all the credit he gave us.” To the contrary, as Voltairine de Cleyre noted a century ago, Hamilton “devised a financial system of which we are the unlucky heritors,” an economic order designed “to puzzle the people and make public finance obscure to those that paid for it.”

Broadway stage performance might seem a retrograde medium for the likes of Hamilton and The Book of Mormon during the decade when web media went mainstream. To the latter’s co-creator Matt Stone, this merely shows that “if you tell good stories, the platforms are sort of beside the point. We made the most analog thing you can think of, a play at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, and it worked out as well as anything we have ever done.” But as Paul Goodman noted in People or Personnel, the capital-intensive, high-risk nature of Broadway (or Off Broadway aspiring to move off Off) “powerfully influences the choice of plays and style of acting and production.”

Skyrocketing rents in and around the Broadway theater district in midtown New York City — with access to real estate depending on political favors rather than business skill — restrict the space available to fresh talent. A production like Beetlejuice which reliably draws devoted crowds can be shuttered due to lack of available theater space. The Drama Book Shop, the space where Hamilton‘s Lin-Manuel Miranda penned his previous Broadway show, In the Heights, was set to close until Miranda personally bailed it out.

For the fortunate shows that make it to Broadway, it can be lucrative to stay there. In the realm of what Goodman calls “un-free enterprise,” restricting supply reaps the benefit of stoked demand without the pressures of competition (while clamping the release valves of legal loopholes or ticket resellers). COVID-era theater shutdowns moved the filmed Hamilton premiere to the Internet instead of movie theaters. If the benefits of withholding had not been artificially inflated, it might have long been viewable via live broadcasting (a la  the Metropolitan Opera’s productions since 2006), research collections like the New York Public Library’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, or DVDs.

Hamilton arrives on an Internet video landscape well on its way to consolidation. Like Marvel Comics antagonist Galactus, compelled to continually devour entire worlds to survive, Disney has absorbed Pixar, Star Wars, the Muppets, Marvel itself, and even major-studio equal Fox into its vault. Those collections make it to home viewing missing words (including an expletive cut from Hamilton), visuals, or even entire episodes.

As de Cleyre understood, the creativity restricted by Hamiltonianism can best be unleashed by “the voluntary association of those interested in the management of matters of common concern, without coercion of the uninterested or the opposed.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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War Is Not Good For the Economy or Living Things

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“At War With the Invisible” aliens. From the cover of the April 1918 issue of Electrical Experimenter magazine. Public domain.

Has New York Times columnist Paul Krugman become an advocate of laissez-faire? Probably not. But if he carried his observations “On the Economics of Not Dying” (May 28) to their logical conclusion, he just might.

Krugman notes that economic growth is “just a means to an end, namely, improving the quality of life” — and that not being dead, rather than just not being poor, “also makes a major contribution to the quality of life.” Yet this seemingly common-sense observation cuts against much of his own economic theorizing.

In 2001, Krugman wrote that “the [9/11] terror attack — like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression — could even do some economic good … the economic slowdown has been a plunge in business investment. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings. As I’ve already indicated, the destruction isn’t big compared with the economy, but rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending.”

A decade later, Krugman looked to the skies to deliver the economic growth that 9/11 had failed to yield: “If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack, and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.”

This economic boost would hold even “if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there weren’t any aliens,” echoing classic science fiction stories in which similar ruses provided fabricated grounds for space programs and earthly cooperation before their long-term benefits materialized.  William Tenn, whose mid-1940s “Alexander the Bait” had one of the earliest such plots, noted in retrospect that while he had been correct to predict that the large-scale effort required to achieve spaceflight would require a concerted effort fueled less by lofty scientific idealism than remorseless self-interest, the motivation would not be “hoping to make a lot of money” but “hoping to make an awful lot of war.”

In a 1933 letter, John Maynard Keynes advised Franklin D. Roosevelt to use deficit spending in peacetime, and feel “free to engage in the interests of peace and prosperity the technique which hitherto has only been allowed to serve the purposes of war and destruction.”  As Robert Higgs explains, assuming that the ensuing military spending brought prosperity relies on the conflation of economic activity with human well-being decried by Krugman.

Yoda is as fictional as Krugman’s hypothetical invaders, but his aphorism that “wars not make one great” should caution historians whose lists of top political leaders are dominated by wartime presidents — and to those who would seek war, or its equivalent, to make the economy great.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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Kent State, Jackson State, and the State

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Location Map of the Kent State shootings from The Report of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest (public domain)
Location Map of the Kent State shootings from The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (public domain)

On two days in May fifty years ago, American police and National Guard troops fired their weapons into crowds of anti-Vietnam-War protesters, killing six American students at two American state universities.

On May 4, 1970 Ohio National Guard troops fatally wounded Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder at Kent State University.

On May 15, officers of the Jackson, Mississippi Police Department and the Mississippi Highway Patrol killed Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green at historically black Jackson State.

The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest appointed by Richard Nixon to investigate the incidents concluded that “the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of [Kent State] students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable” and that “the 28-second barrage of lethal gunfire [at Jackson State] was completely unwarranted and unjustified.”

In laying the theory for the modern nation-state as a bulwark against civil disorder, Thomas Hobbes insisted that its subjects retained “the liberty to disobey” orders “not to resist those that assault” them.

Yet while the 1970s would bring reductions in state power, with the cessation of the Vietnam War and its associated draft, such a right was never conceded in principle; the Commission recommended that “possession or use of weapons on campus by students should be strongly condemned” with no exceptions for self-defense. What the Commission called “the confidence of white officers that if they fire weapons during a black campus disturbance they will face neither stern departmental discipline nor criminal prosecution or conviction” was borne out.

While the Commission noted the discontent of those in higher education who “seek a community of companions and scholars, but find an impersonal multiversity,” it recommended increasing the role of state funding, which would effectively shift the leverage of power further away from the participants. As David Friedman noted at the time, “the lack of student power which the New Left deplores is a direct result of the success of one of the pet schemes of the old left, heavily subsidized schooling.”

The events of half a century ago serve as a reminder, as Voltairine de Cleyre observed a full century ago, that “the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.” Remembering our unvarnished history can revive such candor long before 2070.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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