The Story:
A story in the Tampa Bay Times recently disclosed that in 2016 Andrew Gillum (D), the Mayor of Tallahassee, Florida, and a candidate for the Governor’s office in that state, received tickets from an undercover FBI agent to the hit Broadway show Hamilton. The agent in question was posing as a real-estate developer, in order to investigate official corruption in Tallahassee.
Reactions:
Gillum’s opponent in the race for Governor, Ron DeSantis (R), has long made the issue of municipal corruption in Tallahassee a major theme of his campaign. He regards the Times report with unsurprising glee.
“It’s now abundantly clear,” he says, “that Andrew Gillum has repeatedly lied about taking free gifts and trips from lobbyists. If he’ll lie about these gifts and trips from lobbyists on national television, what else is he lying about?”
The Thing to Know:
The late economist Milton Friedman used to say, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Though Gillum’s receipt of the tickets may have been innocent, it was at best naive, and he would have done well to think to himself, “There ain’t no such thing as a free Broadway show.”
