Hamilton Economic Policy Rap...
These days when you talk about Hamilton
People want you to get your rap on
Infringing Manuel’s intellectual property
Is not where any of us want to be.
Still, to satisfy the particular audience
You have to try to do the dance
So let’s jump in: how it goes
We’ll have to see—only heaven knows.
Poor boy from the Caribbean
Looking for a better place to be in
Barely able to go to college
Seeking for all kinds of knowledge:
“Jefferson: you’re fine on liberty
But you’re blind from agrarian ideology
A farming country patterned by the British crown
Is not a place where I can win renown
Or build up a proper state—
The kind that can make a land truly great.”
Considerations of practicality
Made Hamilton turn toward urbanity
To make America a not-poor economy
Required developing its own technology.
Banks, bonds, steam engines, and cotton mills:
These were what would give the thrills
To those seeking power to make their destiny
And wealth enough so they could truly be
A republican example to European nations
To show them what should be their proper station.
But to turn Hamilton into a marble statue—
You won’t like where that will get you.
The father of “developmental state” ideology
Is not the icon you should want him to be.
Sticking rigidly turns ideas to jokes—
We need different strokes for different folks
Old ideas hold many terrors
When they are ripped out of their proper eras.
Economic policy when made pragmatically—
That is the road to proper prosperity.
Always the American politician
Would come to the same decision—
Excess ideological rigidity
Cripples American prosperity.
Boosting real economic dynamics
Needs trashing Spencer’s Social Statics…
