Corporate Welfare for a Play about the Founding Father of Corporate Welfare

 

Corporate Welfare for a Play about the Founding Father of Corporate Welfare

By Thomas DiLorenzo

July 5, 2021

 

 

The Senile Joe administration is reportedly giving at least $50 million in corporate welfare to the Puerto Rican socialist Lin-Manual Miranda, the director of the Broadway play “Hamilton,” despite the fact that the play has grossed more than $650 million on Broadway alone.  Hamilton was of course the founding father of corporate welfare with his silly “infant industry” argument for such subsidies.  Ben Bernanke also once praised him as the founding father of central banking in America since he championed the first federal bank controlled by politicians, the long-defunct Bank of the United States.  He was also a hyper protectionist, another form of corporate welfare at the expense of the general public.  His only economic “education” was reading propaganda pamphlets of British mercantilists (Like the British Caribbean slave plantation owners who employed him in St. Croix as a young man and paid for his education at what is

now Columbia University).

Hamilton was an economic ignoramus who spouted such nonsense as saying that because of transportation costs that might increase prices, NO imports should be permitted into the country, and that only crops that cannot be grown here should be allowed to be imported.  According to his theory, neither should interstate competition be permitted.  He claimed that a large national debt is a “public blessing,” preceding Keynesian superstition on the subject by almost a century and a half, and was also the inventor of the claptrap about a “living constitution.”  (Hint: Substitute the word “no” for “living” and you will know what they mean).

Is there any wonder why Puerto Rican socialists and their American leftist NYC comrades have gone to such lengths to idolize Alexander Hamilton? The Big Government, statist Right also idolizes Hamilton for his statism.  Pat Buchanan once said to me, “Alexander Hamilton is my hero.”  For a perspective on the real Hamilton see my book, Hamilton’s Curse.  (For a devastating demolition of Hamilton’s gross economic ignorance find the online classic, Alexander Hamilton, by the great late nineteenth-century libertarian scholar and Yale Professor William Graham Sumner).

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