Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says he has an economic plan for America to “Build Back Better.” US president Donald Trump complains that Biden “plagiarized” significant elements of that plan from, you guessed it, Donald Trump.

Both plans are packed full of bad ideas that have been proposed a thousand times by a thousand other politicians, so the plagiarism claim seems more trollish than truthy. The problem with both economic plans isn’t that they’re plagiarized, it’s that they ARE economic plans.

What is an economy?

Ask a politician, and you might get the idea that an economy is a metaphorical truck full of goodies. Give the keys to the right politician and everyone gets candy and ice cream. Give the keys to the wrong politician and he rolls the truck into a ravine and everyone starves.

Ask a bureaucrat, and you’re likely to get lists of “key indicators,” accompanied by graphs and charts attempting to explain life, the universe, and everything in terms of those indicators.

In actuality, an economy is the aggregate of nearly every decision, made by nearly every human being on the planet, nearly every second, of nearly every hour, of nearly every day.

The economy is whether you have lunch, and if so what you eat and how much of it.

The economy is whether you go to work today or call in sick and return to bed.

The economy is whether you try to make that old beater last one more year, or give in and go shopping for a new car, or start bicycling more and driving less.

The economy is everything you and eight billion other people decide to buy or not buy, sell or not sell, consume or not consume, and do or not do, 24/7/365, cradle to grave.

The idea that a politician or bureaucrat (government or corporate) can come up with an “economic plan” that takes all the relevant variables into account — forecasts what people need or want and efficiently allocates resources to make sure they get it — isn’t just silly, it’s dangerous.  We’re not even very good at forecasting the weather yet. Behind politicians’ “economic plans” lies the kind of hubris that that turns recessions into depressions, droughts into mass starvation episodes, and trade wars into shooting wars.

According to the “Build Back Better” plan, “Joe Biden believes to his core that there’s no greater economic engine in the world than the hard work and ingenuity of the American people.” Trump makes similar noises.

If they actually believed it, their “economic plans” would be identical and 11 words long: “Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui meme” (“Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself”).

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

If there’s been one bright spot in America’s COVID-19 experience, it’s the near-complete shutdown of an expensive and obsolete government education system cribbed from mid-19th century Prussia.

Across the country, “public” pre-K thru 12th-grade programs closed their doors this spring. Some districts attempted to hobble along using not yet ready for prime time online learning systems. Others just turned the kids loose to likely learn far more than they would have in the combination daycare centers and youth prisons that pass for schools these days.

It was a perfect opportunity to scrap “public education” as we know it, perhaps transitioning entirely to distance learning as a waypoint on the journey toward separation of school and state.

Naturally, the political class hates that idea. Primary and secondary education constitute an $800 billion per year job and welfare program, with beneficiaries (read: voters and campaign contributors) up and down its extensive food chain.

Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran isn’t one to let a little thing like a pandemic derail that gravy train: He’s ordered the state’s government schools to re-open in August,  operating at least five days per week and offering “the full panoply of services” — from glorified babysitting to teacher pay to big agribusiness buys for school lunch programs — to those beneficiaries.

It seems likely that most states will follow Corcoran’s lead to one degree or another, naturally also seeking ways to blow even more money than usual on enhanced social distancing, increased surface disinfection work, etc.

That seems to be the consensus of the entire American mainstream political class, from “progressive left” to “conservative right.”

Yes, Republicans and evangelical Christians will bellyache about the teachers’ unions,.

Yes, Democrats and the unions will gripe about charter schools and voucher programs.

But they’re united in their determination to resuscitate the system as it existed before the pandemic, instead of letting that rotten system die a well-deserved death and moving on to better things.

There’s a word for that attitude.

The word is “reactionary.”

As time goes on, we’ll hear lots of agonized propaganda about how the pandemic has forced huge changes in “public” education. Those changes will be entirely cosmetic. The authoritarian infrastructure beneath won’t have changed at all.

By letting the political class pretend that history can be forced to run backward, we’re denying future generations the real educational opportunities that past generations denied us.

School’s out. We should keep it that way.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Time to Drop Hamilton’s Economics,” by Joel Schlosberg, River Cities’ Reader [Davenport, Iowa], 07/06/20
• “Time to drop Hamilton’s economics,” by Joel Schlosberg, Heartland Newsfeed [Nokomis, IL], 07/06/20
• “’All the Credit He Gave Us:’ Time to Drop Hamilton’s Economics,”
  by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch,  07/08/20
• “’All the Credit He Gave Us:’ Time to Drop Hamilton’s Economics,”
  by Joel Schlosberg, Radio Free,  07/08/20
• “Time to drop Hamilton’s economics,” by Joel Schlosberg, Creston, Iowa News Advertiser, 02/05/19
• “Time to drop Hamilton’s economics,” by Joel Schlosberg, Glendale, Arizona Star (both web and print), 07/09/20
• “Time to Drop Hamilton’s Economics,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 07/12/20