I saw the small-scale off-Broadway show Luigi: The Musical last week at the suggestion of libertarian comedian Lou Perez. Whether one considers the play hilarious or in unacceptably bad taste (or both, which really can be the case), it was definitely an example of something about which I worry even more than the quality of music, comedy, or theater: namely, the reduction of what should be timeless economic abstractions to unpredictable, highly subjective personality conflicts (I admit I have unusual tastes). Several such contractions from the principled to the petty were in economic news this month.
Most people have little hope of understanding the laws of economics—though I think they could if intellectuals ever bothered to explain the basics, such as supply and demand. Frustrated and confused, the public instead latches onto specific heroes and villains in the news (a Musk here, a Starmer there) and gets more agitated over the details of those individuals’ lives than over policy changes that might enrich or impoverish billions of lives.
That’s how you end up with an ornery Luigi Mangione fatally shooting a health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan—rather than, say, writing an econ argument about cartelization in healthcare, or for that matter writing an explanation of his own family’s rumored vested interest in expanding its own healthcare businesses.
That’s also how you end up with one of those notorious Luigi fangirls, the ones in the news recently for showing up on the courthouse steps hoping for a glimpse of their homicidal leftist hero, being in the audience the night I attended. They may not know all the arguments, but they know that one killer/hunk.
As Lou might say, it’s wrong to declare anything off-limits to comedy, just as it would be culturally detrimental to suggest some scenes should never appear in paintings. But I’d add that we shouldn’t deny art can have detrimental effects, right along with the beneficial ones, and I hope Luigi being depicted mostly-sympathetically in this play won’t subtly encourage that fangirl or her cronies to imitate his violent actions or to excuse future such actions by others. (Watch the site Pirate Wires for Lou’s take on the show, likely funnier than my own.)
It’s hardly just New York City or the U.S. that habitually crams huge philosophical topics into dinky personal anecdotes and character portraits, though. Twentieth-century leftists from the Stalinists to social-realist playwrights complained about this tendency all the time, and they weren’t all wrong, even if I was usually rooting for the bourgeois-individualist novelists and moviemakers about whom the leftists were complaining.
Lou’s Argentine relatives, for example, have long attached shifts in econ policy to outsize personalities such as the socialist/autocratic Perons and now the half-crazy self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist libertarian president Javier Milei.
I notice a few semi-famous, Fox News-adjacent pundits posting their Argentine vacation pics in the past several weeks, no doubt in part to show they made a pilgrimage to the land of (Trump ally) Milei—though I think one of them deleted my basic-philosophy inquiry about whether any of them consider themselves anarcho-capitalists as opposed to mere populists. Technical philosophical or moral questions, even sympathetic ones, are considered rudeness among the politically semi-famous, as clarification might limit their political or professional options.
In theory, abstract systems such as rules-bound markets and science should smooth out local or personal conflicts and leave us with efficient rationality. There’s nothing wrong with that theory and it approximates real-life experience, but humanity will never tire of throwing roadblocks in the way of theory’s implementation, from unexpected murders to routine acts of graft and adultery.
Whether this year’s elections in the U.S. move leftward or not, for instance, may hinge less on how the fundamental laws of economics work than on a celebrity such as actor Giancarlo Esposito—thought of as an iconic Latino mainly because of roles he has played rather than because of his actual birth in Denmark, childhood in Rome, upbringing in New York City by a half-black/half-Italian couple, and conversion to Islam—telling Variety with psychopathic coldness in a recent red-carpet interview that he thinks it’s time for anti-capitalist revolution and that even if five million or 50 million people die in the ensuing bloodbath, it’ll be worth it to forge a better world.
There was a time not so long ago when you got put on a watchlist for saying things like that rather than on a shortlist for the Critics’ Choice Awards. Actually, you probably get put on both now.
But fear not, fellow libertarian individualists: there is art for you, too, and this week brings the stage version (not to be confused with the earlier film version) of Cole Gentles’ unapologetically 1970s-like rock opera/space opera performance Death of a Rockstar at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. I hope to attend, so complain there (non-violently) if I’ve ever led you astray aesthetically, politically, or personally.
And lest you think we libertarian-leaning folk are blind to corporate crimes, check out Sarah Federman’s important new tome Corporate Reckoning about the complicated ways companies try (or not) to atone for ugly episodes from their own histories. Nothing’s perfect. But let’s not start killing each other over it.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey