Another Great Abundance Review

"The Purpose of a System is What it Does"

The Purpose of a System is What It Does

Charles Fain Lehman

is a fantastic writer and political economy thinker. His review of Abundance picks up on many points implied or left out of my review.

The first way to understand Abundance is as an intra-coalitional argument. Klein and Thompson are (they take great pains to remind us) liberals. And the book’s primary audience is fellow liberals, with the goal of galvanizing one side of an intra-liberal debate while chastising another.

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But another, more practical inference is that Klein and Thompson are hard-headed realists. There are political consequences to blue America’s “procedure fetish.” Many blue states are projected to shrink substantially by the next congressional reapportionment. This is thanks largely to out-migration driven in turn by sky-high housing prices and the comparatively low cost of living in low-regulation states like Texas and Florida. As a result, the Electoral College may be simply out of reach for a real progressive for a generation.

Which is not to say that Klein and Thompson are simply partisans. Rather, they recognize the fact that there are electoral consequences to refusing to build. And, more generally, they understand that if liberalism continues to get in its own way, it will do so at the cost of its legitimacy. If you want people to believe that government can provide results, government has to actually do it; if it can’t, then people won’t trust government.

In other words, Democrats winning and overregulation are not separable in reality. Klein and Thompson want to create a vortex that sucks in Dems and moderates, but in the real world, you have to choose between an abundance coalition that is supported by and supports right-wing factions like big business, the oil industry, and car dealership owners. You need a new Democratic oligarchy.

a better way to understand the everything bagel phenomenon is as coalition management.⁴ It’s not that the IRA got passed or public housing gets built in spite of the giveaways and procedural requirements layered on top. It’s that the IRA got passed or public housing gets built because of the giveaways and procedural requirements layered on top.

Perhaps

Curtis Yarvin

is actually existing abundance.

But it does mean that the state building looks very different from private enterprise building. In order to build in a democratic⁵ state, you need someone who can successfully wrangle all the interests that are formally and informally entitled to vetoes if they don’t get their pay-off. You need extreme executive agency—akin to, or greater than, what you see in the private sector.

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Against this backdrop, it’s worth asking why, exactly, we should want the state to build. After all, the private market is quite good at growth. Yes, we should get the government out of its way. But we should certainly not regard the state as an effective substitute.

Robert Moses, A Democratic Monarch?

My review: