The problem for Democrats is their political support is based on massive grift. The biggest supporters of the Democratic party are college academia and public sector unions (especially public education). Both these groups have the self-interest of using taxpayer money to provide themselves secure, comfortable employment. These groups assert their financial benefit is deserved because they provide a public good but they refuse to be measured by how well they actually perform that job!
An abundance agenda would require the demolition of the college academy cartel and public sector unions. Thus, I do not see the abundance agenda being accepted by the Democratic party. The gatekeepers of that party will refuse it and the party will have no choice but to go along - for the Democratic party is hostage to the status quo of funneling taxpayer money to academia and the public sector.
For a centrist political movement the Abundance agenda is fantastic and has the potential of pulling moderates away from the Democratic party dogma. The great question is can these moderates be elected? Clearly it is not easy for a "moderate" to survive his/her own party dogma- look at the grief Fetterman and Massie get for bucking their party dogma.
Trumpism / MAGA is about national abundance - big spending and the promotion of domestic industry. The Trump agenda is making the Democrats irrelevant on the national stage. But if/when economic crisis comes Trumpism will face a reckoning. It would be great if the Democrats were able to respond at that moment with a message of national investment with real accountability. But alas, I do not believe that can happen. A zebra cannot change its stripes.
When Democrats come back into power they will pull the same political stunt they have done for the past 60 years - promising bread in everyone's basket and then failing to deliver.
The plan is to elect moderates in red and purple states but still have the progressives drive the agenda.
See also, putting the “centrist” meat puppet Biden atop the Bernie/Liz platform, or all of the “centrist” Dem House candidates pushed forward in the 2006 or 2018 midterms only to follow Pelosi’s agenda to the letter without dissent, or Rahm saying a man can’t be a woman. Centrism is for show only. It is not where the money is, but it is where some of the votes are. The key is to get some of those votes but never risk the money.
I think this is a very apt diagnosis. I would only add that there are two central dogmas:
1: The American people need to be ruled in all particulars
2: They are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans
Democrats are not the only ones to hold those two dogmas, but they are absolutely central to Democratic thought. I wouldn't have a problem with them so much if 1 was not so central. Pushing for extremely limited government action is in fact a sign that someone is morally and intellectually superior I find. "Government is the answer; what's the question?" is a sign of a stunted mind I find.
I believe the main reason most Americans are so dissatisfied is because government in the US has expanded into daily lives so much that everything it does conflicts with so much else that it does that it is impossible to do anything without upsetting more people than it helps. Government solutions are always one-size-fits-nobody, whereas private party solutions are either personal and exactly what is wanted, or are voluntarily chosen by individuals who have choices.
The government one-size-fits-nobody fixes all require more one-size-fits-nobody fixes, making their bureaucrats very happy, but it's like adding bandages on top of bandages instead of cleaning the wound and applying fresh bandages. Eventually the pile of festering bandages topples off, but in the meantime it's such a foul mess that no one wants to get near it and no one remembers what the original problem was.
Great comment. In 2007, the Heritage Guys stopped including their chart of "government intrusion into citizens lives" in their annual reckoning of country's general operation because the US scored lower than the PRC. Folks are so inured with having the government into every detail of our lives, most don't even see it anymore.
I have had arguments with people who refuse to believe that private parties ever built roads and dams. They didn’t come out and call me a liar directly, they just refused to believe it.
What's your point? Do you think the private sector could have built the interstate highway system? When a developer puts in a new subdivision they have to build the streets in it. Sometimes private parties build and operate toll roads (where told to by the government). Do you see a bigger role?
Your comment kind of sounds like you don't know much more about dams than the people you refer to. Most dams in the US are privately constructed and owned. Private parties still build dams. They tend to be relatively small for water retention within a development or a recreation lake. Sometimes it's both. Also water retention for agriculture. The largest dams are mostly or all federal and many serve multiple purposes and regional needs.
If you actually think the interstate highway system is well-designed, you don't know much about its history, the corruption, favoritism, and racism which went into it.
Yes I do believe free markets can do better than eminent domain and taxes.
An interstate highway system does need, at some early point, a central government implementing eminent domain, or some very similar facsimile. Taxes be damned, it should all be toll road. In The People's Republic of China, all the "interstates" (actually intra and inter province) are toll. All of them. Those that don't use the freeway system, are not paying for it.
Yes, it is indeed that government meddling has increased. No one needed a government permission slip to cut hair for a living 200 years ago; why is it necessary now, including 9 months of full time school? Why do beer bottlers need government approval of the names of their beers? Child car seats are now required for minors weighing less than 80 pounds, and minors younger than 16 years are not allowed in front seats. A store near me was fined for having an indoor sign more than 1/4 the size of its front window. Proposition 65 stickers everywhere you look in California. NO STEP signs on the back sides of ladders. Parents arrested and children kidnapped by CPS because the children were playing in their fenced-in front yard without their parents constant attendance.
Every once in a while, someone publishes lists of new laws and regulations, and they are petty beyond belief. At some point, it becomes more profitable, both financially and emotionally, to sic government on everybody else than to mind one's own business. And it still doesn't keep government meddling out of our own affairs.
After a while, people take out their frustration on everybody else, because no one has a snowball's chance in hell of getting fair shake from government courts siding with their fellow government employees.
I live in China most of the year. China, the ostensible heartland for rules and regulations, doesn't have that crap. Business there is hard. Really hard. They don't put unnecessary government encumbrance on small business. That's right. The Commies are less in people's faces for business than America. (Yes, of course there are the other aggravations, but what we're talking about here isn't one of them.) I take shit for this online, but it's true.
It would not surprise me, but of course I can't verify it. The US is famous for having an independent individualist streak, but when push comes to shove, Americans love them some regulations, and I flat out do not understand it.
When Dr. Kling was on Askblog, the header was "Taking the most charitable view of those who disagree". I notice just now that it's not here at his Substack blog, and there seems to be less and less of that attitude, both in Dr. Kling's own posts and in the responses to them in this comment section.
To be clear, I don't disagree with the substance of most of Dr. K's writing, including this current post. But recently, there seems to be more of assymetrical insight in those posts, and a great deal of it here in the comments. Indeed, some of the latter seem very much like the mirror image of the tendency on the left to treat opposition to progressivism as a psychiatric disorder, to be diagnosed and hopefully cured, and not as a position subject to reasoned debate.
"recently, there seems to be more of assymetrical insight in those posts" . . . I believe that is true . . . but there may well be a good reason for that. Sometimes the drag from one side of the pole becomes so obvious that the center cannot hold.
There is also a difference between making an observation about the behaviours and belief systems of groups of individuals (or Trump) and honestly debating a policy supported by that group on its merits. Kling seems very fair when it comes to the latter, whereas an observation is an observation - doesn’t do much good to obscure it.
As a general rule, first, verify d/dx > 0. Otherwise it is a waste of time and effort.
What I mean is, there has to be some justifiable expectation that change is possible and feasible. That original positions would change with exposure to more and better information and logically valid arguments which weight against those positions. One doesn't have to get all 'Bayesian' or 'Rationalist' about it, it's about knowing one is dealing with another who possesses the quality of being genuinely open-minded and persuadable. It is pointless to push against an immovable object.
The question is one of reasonableness and flexibility of belief, the difference between an eternally provisional hypothesis and a eternally impervious dogma. It's not necessarily wrong in some pan-metaphysical sense to have and adhere to inflexible beliefs, however, it is pointless to have debates about them, and fraudulent to entice others in bad faith to engage in such debates under the false pretense that one's mind is open when it is in fact closed.
In science one can only assess claims if they are in principle falsifiable. In markets one can only haggle over an exchange if there are prices, as opposed to matters some humans hold sacred to the point they are not for sale at any price. In the law a prosecutor can only bear a burden of providing proof beyond reasonable amounts of doubt, but not that of addressing all possible doubts.
Similarly, if "reasoned debate" is to have any meaning, it is reliant on a foundation consisting of the tacit or implicit promise by participants that they have open minds and would change their opinions or positions under some reasonable set of circumstance of feasibly demonstrable set of evidence and arguments. And the best and quickest way to test for this condition at the very outset is simple to ask one's opponent to explicitly articulate those circumstances in advance. "Provide me a target to aim at, and commit on your honor that should I hit it, you will be persuaded." It doesn't have to be "on honor", though sometimes that's enough. One could go further and actually put some real money at stake in a big public bet.
And if the person you are dealing with is unwilling to do that, then best to move on to someone who will.
I'm not even sure if one side or the other has to be able to change their position. Your position and mine might differ on some fundamental premise that's not subject to scientific proof or disproof.
The obvious example of this is abortion: many, if not most, opponents of abortion on demand believe that the conceptus has a moral status close to or equal to that of someone who's been born; many, if not most, proponents of AOD believe that its moral status is far less than that of a born human being. These beliefs aren't subject to scientific proof or disproof; and their holders' stance on abortion derive from those fundamental premises, so can't be changed by factual evidence.
But nevertheless, reasoned debate can occur. It might not change minds, but at least it can give each side a more charitable picture of the other. In the absence of such debate, it's easy for supporters of AOD to believe that its opponents only want to subjugate women; and easy for opponents to believe that supporters are indifferent to the suffering and death of helpless babies. Let the two sides encounter one another in a non-hostile fashion, and it's far less easy for each to regard the other as a collection of moral monsters who need to be suppressed by any means possible.
Most liberals say the same thing. Neither is accurate though I agree it often seems that way. If nothing else, I'd suggest you attend some Braver Angels events. Probably not exactly what you are looking for but it might be close. It might give you some hope.
Reading Chernow's biography of Washington, I was continually struck by Washington's example of leadership and how he thrived on duty, restraint and the courage to leave power. This as opposed to today's buffoons who are in constant campaign mode and prone to moral grandstanding, or as you say, their entitlement to rule. It would be so refreshing to watch our political stewards strengthen our institutions if they'd see themselves as temporary guardians of the republic instead of perpetual antagonists.
"Sowell argues that people on the left who are politically engaged behave as if they were anointed with wisdom that others lack. This belief is so strongly held that nothing counts as evidence against it. It is an axiom, not an empirically falsifiable proposition."
I think it's a function of the desire to reward cooperators and punish defectors that you've written about previously. The Ezra Klein types probably conceive the situation as being one where their coalition favors more collective action, which they classify as a form of cooperation and thus pro-social behavior, while their opponents do not, making them defectors and thus anti-social, little different from chronic litterers or vandals. You can understand how this would lead to a sense of self-righteousness: if your primary political opposition is comprised largely of people exhibiting anti-social tendencies, you'd never consider them legitimate, either.
If you ask me, this is a cognitive failure born of sub-Dunbar thinking, but I'm sure I've got my own epistemological failure modes, also.
I think it's mainly that the other side is happy with sending random Venezuelan people straight to Salvadoran prison without a trial. Etc etc, examples could be multiplied.
I say this in full knowledge that Democrats are on board with a lot of race and sex discrimination and have done much evil in service of that goal. Still, the El Salvador thing plus January 6, etc etc, reflects worse moral values and quality of thinking.
That sense of moral superiority also stems from the fact that most progressives only know people like themselves. It’s the “ conservatives in the mist” of Jonah Goldberg. Consequently they automatically assign the worst intentions to people and ideas they literally do not understand, hence the idea that Americans are the worst bigots on the planet and need to be managed and educated serves as virtue signaling and justification for censure.
"meaning the ability of government to build things without its own regulations getting in the way"
Love this definition of "abundance".
You know the abundance crowd never wants to just get out of the way of people.
People aren't going to be in charge of their education (they are against school vouchers). People aren't going to be in charge of their entrepreneurial decisions (we should have industrial policy directed by people like them) people should't have more control over their paycheck (we need higher taxes and a robust welfare state).
The regulations on people are to stay in place, but blue cities are supposed to get out of their own ways (and possibly real estate developers, but not too much).
Noah Smith the other day asks what MAGA has built. But I'm living in what MAGA built. MAGA built high speed rail (bright line). It build the #1 housing development in the country (that I'm living in). It is building private education via universal school choice. My state is arguing over just how much taxes to cut because of our huge budget surplus.
MAGA is about getting government, especially the federal government, out of the way of building. It gives freedom back to people.
Trump's industrial policy sure doesn't give freedom back to the people. That personal power grab in the US Steel deal and his constant threats to Walmart, Amazon, and others who dare to say his tariffs have raised prices don't give freedom back to the people.
I've decided I don't think this kind of threat or even the tariffs mean a whole lot to "freedom".
Tariffs are no more of an diminuation on freedom to any individual than any other tax. It is, but in our society, where we have a hundred different taxes already, the effect of Trump's anti-freedom policies is pretty marginal.
On the other hand, as forumposter123 says, the effect of Trump's pro-freedom policies is pretty noticeable. I know it will be controversial, but I'll add law-enforcement and anti-DEI stuff as pro-freedom.
Simply put, every political policy, by definition, is a trade-off between different margins of freedom. There is no Pareto improving policy in most real-world cases.
Trump has, on balance, done more to improve freedom than Biden did or Harris would have. That doesn't mean pretending personal freedom is what drives his decisions.
Now imagine all those hundred different taxes change on personal whims of the President, sometimes daily, and very much dependent on said President's fragile ego and what various shadowy insiders have been whispering in his ear.
Tell me that doesn't infringe on freedom and destroy economies.
1. I never said personal freedom is what drives Trump's (or any politician's) decisions because I don't think it does. It's pretty irrelevant.
2. ... and we see its irrelvance because all of those hundred different taxes don't change on personal whims of the president. If you think that's what's going on now, I'd ask you to square that belief with the fact that the economy seems to be doing fine and, by your own admission, more is being done to "improve freedom" than we could have expected under the alternatives.
I don't think Trump is uniquely ego-driven or that his ego is particularly fragile compared to the average politician. The difference is simply that Trump is willing to get up and publicly say things to get his way, and that Trump is reported on with their weird naïveté as if every soundbite he utters is an official proclamation of policy. Even when it's obvious it isn't.
The difference is just that it's perhaps more visible. Which is a good thing, actually.
forumposter wrote "It[MAGA] gives freedom back to people". That's where the "personal freedom" topic comes from.
And speaking of losing the thread, the fact that those hundred taxes don't change on the personal whims of the president, but his tariffs do, was exactly my point in comparing the two.
The economy "seems" to be doing just fine is a ridiculous assertion. His latest tariffs haven't even gone into effect yet, and the ones which have taken effect have only raised taxes $300 billion or so.
The funniest thing about Trumpies is how they brag on his reducing taxes, brag on tariff revenue, and refuse to admit that increased tariff revenue is a tax increase.
Did you object when Biden censored social media? Then you should have objected when Trump threatened Amazon and Walmart for raising prices to pay for his tax increases.
Bro, I spend my entire career debating which of a hundred different taxes or regulations or rates will change daily based on the arbitrary whims of CMS, or congress, or some judge somewhere.
Four years ago whether my kids school would be open or whether I'd be allowed to leave the house was largely based on such daily changing arbitrary whims.
Don't know what planet your on.
"and the ones which have taken effect have only raised taxes $300 billion or so."
Yeah, that's how the math pens on the tariffs he's likely to collect. It also works out to around what his BBB costs a year. Remarkable, he replaced income taxes with a modest tax on foreign goods in response to record trade deficits.
He basically got Americans to accept a modest VAT in exchange for income taxes.
While also getting foreigners to make longer term investments in America (instead of a bunch of treasury hot money that could abandon us in a second).
"and refuse to admit that increased tariff revenue is a tax increase."
Bro today CMS is going to announce that the CBO score on the IRA was off by a billions more a year, something literally everyone in the industry predicted. I remember when Biden called it "savings" and used it to justify more spending.
I object, but I also see a difference between threats and negotiation tactics (which Amazon and Walmart were also employing) and actual, formal government action. A threatened tariff, which may or may not happen is not a tariff.
I had no idea the tariffs were raising $300B. That's actually amazing. Pre-COVID that would represent 30-50% of the total deficit. It's not insubstantial as I've been lead to believe.
I just read the tariffs raised only $150 billion in the first six months. Possibly I remembered that as $300 billion for a full year, but that assumes the second six months repeat the first.
Ripe areas of abundance include home affordability, electricity affordability, transportation efficiency and education. America pursued and realized these objectives in the 20th century. And then the grift game got in gear and now in many places it is crazy expensive to build homes, electricity is scarce and expensive, the roads are overused and poorly maintained and education is costly and ineffective.
The grift means no insider has the motivation to change the status quo. The insiders control the process and will always serve their self interest - the beatings will continue even as moral is further crushed.
And the local nature of these problems means a charismatic president - whether it be a Trump, an Obama or a Bill Clinton - cannot fix it. Florida can grow its real economy because it has a governor who is able to lead. Blue state politicians are beholden to the grifters, and many times the politicians are at the head of the grift line!
And even in Red States the grifters are in control. There is no good reason a person who owns an acre of land shouldn't be able to quickly and cheaply build a quality home on that land. But it simply cannot be done! The regulations and controls run so deep and far even in states and counties where one would think "small government" policy was dominant, the building commission is God and it will let you know it.
"There is no good reason a person who owns an acre of land shouldn't be able to quickly and cheaply build a quality home on that land."
Location, location, location. For about 99% of privately-owned acres of US land, it is indeed quick, cheap, and easy to build a quality home. At least, substantially quicker, cheaper, and easier than it is to do so in some big metro area.
If you'll allow a little poetic quantitative license - 100% of the people have that right on 99% of the land. However, 99% of the people prefer to live close to each other on the 1% of the land where they don't get those rights.
Now, things may have changed since then, and in more places, but I once corresponded with what you might call a classic stereotypical state-hater prepper who dreamed of buying some land in the middle of nowhere where he could go could nearly entirely off-grid, pay only a nominal amount of taxes, build whatever he wanted, have his own long-distance firing range, etc. Well, he experienced a financial windfall and went out and did it. Coming in with big metro suburban county-code-nazi-traumatized expectations, he was truly shocked how quick and easy it was.
I also knew a law professor (who was also a trained architect) who grew up on and inherited some very scenic farmland and fantasized for decades of building his own imagined and custom-designed dream mansion out there. Well, he did, and it's magnificent, and it cost him less than an Arlington bungalow which doesn't even have a carport, but where do you think his grandchild lives?
Yes, it is now undoubtedly far too difficult and expensive to build in big metro areas. But, complain though they do, the market reveals that people don't really think the situation is bad enough to try some feasible alternatives which mostly they seem to find even more unappealing.
Agree, except a partial disagree on the home affordability index. Housing is expensive for lots of reasons, but one reason that doesn't get talked about is WHAT and HOW we build. Our building industry is, in large part, a fashion industry. To accommodate those fashions, we've created a secondary industry to manufacture and fabricate materials to mimic the look of the old original stuff...fake wood, fake masonry, fake stone, fake shingles, etc., etc. Those new materials have very different installation requirements which hugely increase the cost of construction.
There's a lot that goes into cost that doesn't get accounted for in the popular discourse because the people writing about it are academics or professional thought leaders with a Substack. They wonder why productivity hasn't improved in the building industry. It's not a mystery for anyone involved in home building.
Richard Hanania has done some excellent work in the past year or so arguing that Democrats (together with the small segment of Never Trump Republicans) are in fact intellectually and morally superior to MAGAs.
This was not true at the time Sowell was writing. The degeneration of the Republican base and the crank sort are a recent phenomenon.
This doesn't mean that the Democrats are all that great. Hanania would agree with you (Arnold) that thoughtful libertarians are better than Democrats on both these courts.
But it does deserve to be acknowledged. I would say that a failure to acknowledge it is your number one blind spot, actually.
"These all are related problems stemming from inter-related causes. Their root is a painful, but well-earned, collapse in national trust."
People, that is just incoherent gibberish-speak, strategically dissembled to shift accountability away from the blameworthy. Which is exactly the problem! You know it wasn't written by the AI's because the AI's have already developed the minimum sense of intellectual shame that would have prevented them from doing so.
It is an absurd usage of the word 'root', i.e., an ultimate upstream cause not itself caused by its own downstream effects. As if the problem was 'trust', which somehow itself is not a consequence of observed failures stemming from a lack of trustworthiness. It would be error but at least not immediately ridiculous to say it's some kind of Catch-22 or vicious cycle, in which trust could bootstrap itself into a self-validating truth if we just believe in it like the kids in Peter Pan, but the writers like DiStefano who blame vague abstract concepts like 'trust' fall short of even the attempt to make that error.
"I’m willing to support Abundance, but not as merely a Democratic Party reform. I want it integrated into an agenda meant to restore faith in the American system and to renew America." - With this line, DiStefano double down on avoiding accountability. It's really hard to fix a problem when you refuse to clearly identify and deal with its actual root cause. He shows that he totally missed the "Everything Bagel Liberalism" (really, progressivism) point Klein and Thompson made when identifying the main culprit and driver of the phenomenon, which Klein also calls 'Vetocracy'. Much as DiStefano might not want to concede the point, it is indeed a problem particular to the American Left. And, to the extent the Left maintains enough power to stop building in America, is something that can only be remedied by, yes, reforms to the way that power is organized and manifested in the form of the Democratic Party.
To be fair, Klein and Thompson weren't quite brave (or reckless) enough to explicitly spoon-feed and hand-walk their center-left readers the whole way to the conclusion, because every step along that path creates more distracting problems for what is already an uphill battle.
Here is what "Vetocracy / Everything Bagel Progressivism" means, in real-speak translation,
"Look people, in actual reality, we cannot get everything you want. Understanding this and facing it is what it means to be be mature, well-adjusted adults in the room and not a bunch of fanatical children lost in magical thinking and imaginative fantasies untethered to actual existence. There IS scarcity, there ARE constraints and limits, of time, money, material, political power, manpower, land, everything. There are inescapable conflicts and trade-offs. Not everything is magically positive-sum. Inevitably, insurmountably, there are occasions for which, if we increase some this, there is literally no choice but to decrease some other that.
"If we are trying to get as much as much as we want that we can get, then to do so so in a smart and sane way means we need to admit these trade-offs exist, understand them, and try our best to prioritize so we can compromise to optimize. To the extent we refuse to do that, we are choosing, actively or passively, a -worse- future, one we will like -less- than a possible alternative! It is because we, the left, the current attitudes and arrangements of the American Democratic Party, cannot currently actually make these trade-offs and do this rational prioritization, that we are -screwing America up- by making it poorer and poorly-performing where nothing can get done. Not even by the GOVERNMENT which -should- theoretically (i.e., like in China, or in New Deal America) enjoy all kind of advantages in getting big things done because, it can use its legal might to just steamroller over troublemakers and roadblockers in ways that make all the power and wealth of big private companies look negligible by comparison.
"And yet, just look at and face the facts. American government now -sucks- at getting things done. Yeah, you are going to blame the right, look, I totally despite them too, but you know what, here's another wake-up call from adult reality: in the bluest places where we can blame the right the least, the government sucks the most. Ouch! I know! This is pretty bad for us, and a particular problem for our particular political side as opposed to an American problem for all distrusting Americans (only some idiot would think that) - precisely because we are the adherents of the ideology and members of the party which WANTS the GOVERNMENT to be the institution doing all these things, which prefers it to those private sectors alternatives, which advocates for more being done by government and which argues for that end not in the manner of saying it's worth the cost, but in saying that the government is actually better at doing them!
Which, sad to say, it currently IS NOT! That would be bad enough, if we could kind of keep fooling people to keep believing government is not as bad as it seems. Unfortunately, we can't even do THAT well anymore, and most people now really believe government IS just as bad as it LOOKS to be in terms getting things done. We haven't faced a collapse in pro-state-competence morale this bad since Reagan! And it's because we aren't prioritizing. We are sweating the small stuff, and for the sake of preventing a drop of some cost we are giving up an ocean of benefit.
Consequentially we are -screwing ourselves- by making our cities and our country pathetic, poorer, and poorer-performing, and making our party lose credibility and popularity, i.e., votes, i.e. POWER! Come on American Left, you let the Wokerati run things for a while, how'd that work out? "That's how you got Trump!" What, too soon? It's the second time! Now it's time to let us center-left adults-in-the-room take the wheel for a while, and get things back on track."
This is what DiStefano missed, and it shows. Now, the problem is, "Ok, and how exactly are you going to prioritize? What principle of adjudication are you going to use to settle disputes and choose between rival claims? How are you weighing all the various factors in your grand social utility formula, and what measure are you trying to optimize for? And what gives you the right to decide? How many points does Social Justice get per basket?"
This is where Klein and Thompson are going to let such a questioner down. They seem only able to vaguely point to, well, on the one hand, a Neoliberal conception of general economic growth, which doesn't exactly "excite the base", to put it mildly. Or else, on the other hand, the political expediency of whatever it takes to keep winning elections. So, some kind of CCP-like sustainable inner-party mechanism that gets the joke and is able to pay lip service to the folk version of the political ideology while at the same time knowing it's kind of childish and dangerous and preventing it from ever actually getting implemented enough that it becomes another example of the party inadvertently shooting itself in the foot, and also somehow making sure that noisy troublemakers on their left who don't get the joke nevertheless get shut out and shut down.
As more accurate versions of the truth are discovered and propagated, they become the new norm. Slowly, the popular JFK quotation evolves into a growing chorus of: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what your country is doing to you.”
The abundance movement seems to be the public choice movement in infancy. Be patient as these folks learn its fundamentals. Understand that their progress is heavily constrained by tribal loyalties, perception management, and risk of material loss. Also see the positive contribution they make to our country. Not all of them, but most.
My favorite part of this post is its opening lines, not only because of its accuracy, but because it sees dogma as a force for good and bad. You’re reinforcing in my mind that there is such thing as good dogma—perhaps synonymous with the word truth.
“A central dogma of American politics is that everyone is entitled to dignity. That is what ‘all men are created equal’ has traditionally meant.
My sense is that the central dogma of partisan Democrats is that they are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans.”
“Or you can champion ‘abundance,’ meaning the ability of government to build things without its own regulations getting in the way.”
I love love love this piece.
But I’m not sure you really meant to write “government” in the above sentence; I think you meant something like “society”.
Because I’ve never before mistaken you as advocating the “You didn’t build that” philosophy of Elizabeth Warren, or that abundance was primarily about what *government* builds.
Even Ezra Klein doesn’t think government is directly responsible for *all* abundance, even as I agree he gives it more direct credit than I - or AK - would.
He mostly just wants to not quite so much strangle the goose that lays the golden eggs so that there will be more such eggs for government to take and put towards his favorite leftist causes.
So much hubris, and so little self-awareness. Klein approaches a decent level of self-knowledge, but whenever he says something reasonable (e.g. Biden isn't fit to be President) he gets shouted down by his own. And now the few who are piling in on "Abundance" with token deregulatory gestures seem to be just engaging in cynical electioneering.
It’s great to quote Sowell, and maybe especially The Vision of the Anointed. Rob Henderson’s Luxury Beliefs is a better phrase, but a subset of the Vision based beliefs. Tho from 1994, most of the topical examples Sowell uses are still relevant, including outrage over higher infant death of black babies delivered by white doctors.
It would be great if Arnold would do a book review of it.
Abundance, for the working & middle classes, is already Trump’s econ plan.
And it’s working. Especially tariffs.
Most “expert” economists have a Blind Spot about tariffs & leverage, including AK. Recent trade deals, with Japan and especially Europe, show Trump’s deal instincts as better than Ivory Tower theory.
The problem for Democrats is their political support is based on massive grift. The biggest supporters of the Democratic party are college academia and public sector unions (especially public education). Both these groups have the self-interest of using taxpayer money to provide themselves secure, comfortable employment. These groups assert their financial benefit is deserved because they provide a public good but they refuse to be measured by how well they actually perform that job!
An abundance agenda would require the demolition of the college academy cartel and public sector unions. Thus, I do not see the abundance agenda being accepted by the Democratic party. The gatekeepers of that party will refuse it and the party will have no choice but to go along - for the Democratic party is hostage to the status quo of funneling taxpayer money to academia and the public sector.
For a centrist political movement the Abundance agenda is fantastic and has the potential of pulling moderates away from the Democratic party dogma. The great question is can these moderates be elected? Clearly it is not easy for a "moderate" to survive his/her own party dogma- look at the grief Fetterman and Massie get for bucking their party dogma.
Trumpism / MAGA is about national abundance - big spending and the promotion of domestic industry. The Trump agenda is making the Democrats irrelevant on the national stage. But if/when economic crisis comes Trumpism will face a reckoning. It would be great if the Democrats were able to respond at that moment with a message of national investment with real accountability. But alas, I do not believe that can happen. A zebra cannot change its stripes.
When Democrats come back into power they will pull the same political stunt they have done for the past 60 years - promising bread in everyone's basket and then failing to deliver.
The plan is to elect moderates in red and purple states but still have the progressives drive the agenda.
See also, putting the “centrist” meat puppet Biden atop the Bernie/Liz platform, or all of the “centrist” Dem House candidates pushed forward in the 2006 or 2018 midterms only to follow Pelosi’s agenda to the letter without dissent, or Rahm saying a man can’t be a woman. Centrism is for show only. It is not where the money is, but it is where some of the votes are. The key is to get some of those votes but never risk the money.
“Half the harm that is done in the world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.” T.S. Eliot (The Cocktail Party)
Excellent.
I think this is a very apt diagnosis. I would only add that there are two central dogmas:
1: The American people need to be ruled in all particulars
2: They are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans
Democrats are not the only ones to hold those two dogmas, but they are absolutely central to Democratic thought. I wouldn't have a problem with them so much if 1 was not so central. Pushing for extremely limited government action is in fact a sign that someone is morally and intellectually superior I find. "Government is the answer; what's the question?" is a sign of a stunted mind I find.
I believe the main reason most Americans are so dissatisfied is because government in the US has expanded into daily lives so much that everything it does conflicts with so much else that it does that it is impossible to do anything without upsetting more people than it helps. Government solutions are always one-size-fits-nobody, whereas private party solutions are either personal and exactly what is wanted, or are voluntarily chosen by individuals who have choices.
The government one-size-fits-nobody fixes all require more one-size-fits-nobody fixes, making their bureaucrats very happy, but it's like adding bandages on top of bandages instead of cleaning the wound and applying fresh bandages. Eventually the pile of festering bandages topples off, but in the meantime it's such a foul mess that no one wants to get near it and no one remembers what the original problem was.
Great comment. In 2007, the Heritage Guys stopped including their chart of "government intrusion into citizens lives" in their annual reckoning of country's general operation because the US scored lower than the PRC. Folks are so inured with having the government into every detail of our lives, most don't even see it anymore.
I have had arguments with people who refuse to believe that private parties ever built roads and dams. They didn’t come out and call me a liar directly, they just refused to believe it.
Yup. Been there. Confirmation bias is a helluva drug.
What's your point? Do you think the private sector could have built the interstate highway system? When a developer puts in a new subdivision they have to build the streets in it. Sometimes private parties build and operate toll roads (where told to by the government). Do you see a bigger role?
Your comment kind of sounds like you don't know much more about dams than the people you refer to. Most dams in the US are privately constructed and owned. Private parties still build dams. They tend to be relatively small for water retention within a development or a recreation lake. Sometimes it's both. Also water retention for agriculture. The largest dams are mostly or all federal and many serve multiple purposes and regional needs.
If you actually think the interstate highway system is well-designed, you don't know much about its history, the corruption, favoritism, and racism which went into it.
Yes I do believe free markets can do better than eminent domain and taxes.
An interstate highway system does need, at some early point, a central government implementing eminent domain, or some very similar facsimile. Taxes be damned, it should all be toll road. In The People's Republic of China, all the "interstates" (actually intra and inter province) are toll. All of them. Those that don't use the freeway system, are not paying for it.
It's not that government action (or inaction) upsets *more* people but that either upsets a politically cohesive group of people.
Yes, it is indeed that government meddling has increased. No one needed a government permission slip to cut hair for a living 200 years ago; why is it necessary now, including 9 months of full time school? Why do beer bottlers need government approval of the names of their beers? Child car seats are now required for minors weighing less than 80 pounds, and minors younger than 16 years are not allowed in front seats. A store near me was fined for having an indoor sign more than 1/4 the size of its front window. Proposition 65 stickers everywhere you look in California. NO STEP signs on the back sides of ladders. Parents arrested and children kidnapped by CPS because the children were playing in their fenced-in front yard without their parents constant attendance.
Every once in a while, someone publishes lists of new laws and regulations, and they are petty beyond belief. At some point, it becomes more profitable, both financially and emotionally, to sic government on everybody else than to mind one's own business. And it still doesn't keep government meddling out of our own affairs.
After a while, people take out their frustration on everybody else, because no one has a snowball's chance in hell of getting fair shake from government courts siding with their fellow government employees.
I live in China most of the year. China, the ostensible heartland for rules and regulations, doesn't have that crap. Business there is hard. Really hard. They don't put unnecessary government encumbrance on small business. That's right. The Commies are less in people's faces for business than America. (Yes, of course there are the other aggravations, but what we're talking about here isn't one of them.) I take shit for this online, but it's true.
It would not surprise me, but of course I can't verify it. The US is famous for having an independent individualist streak, but when push comes to shove, Americans love them some regulations, and I flat out do not understand it.
When Dr. Kling was on Askblog, the header was "Taking the most charitable view of those who disagree". I notice just now that it's not here at his Substack blog, and there seems to be less and less of that attitude, both in Dr. Kling's own posts and in the responses to them in this comment section.
To be clear, I don't disagree with the substance of most of Dr. K's writing, including this current post. But recently, there seems to be more of assymetrical insight in those posts, and a great deal of it here in the comments. Indeed, some of the latter seem very much like the mirror image of the tendency on the left to treat opposition to progressivism as a psychiatric disorder, to be diagnosed and hopefully cured, and not as a position subject to reasoned debate.
"recently, there seems to be more of assymetrical insight in those posts" . . . I believe that is true . . . but there may well be a good reason for that. Sometimes the drag from one side of the pole becomes so obvious that the center cannot hold.
There is also a difference between making an observation about the behaviours and belief systems of groups of individuals (or Trump) and honestly debating a policy supported by that group on its merits. Kling seems very fair when it comes to the latter, whereas an observation is an observation - doesn’t do much good to obscure it.
How would one approach trying to have a reasoned debate if the subject is the inability to have reasoned debate?
As a general rule, first, verify d/dx > 0. Otherwise it is a waste of time and effort.
What I mean is, there has to be some justifiable expectation that change is possible and feasible. That original positions would change with exposure to more and better information and logically valid arguments which weight against those positions. One doesn't have to get all 'Bayesian' or 'Rationalist' about it, it's about knowing one is dealing with another who possesses the quality of being genuinely open-minded and persuadable. It is pointless to push against an immovable object.
The question is one of reasonableness and flexibility of belief, the difference between an eternally provisional hypothesis and a eternally impervious dogma. It's not necessarily wrong in some pan-metaphysical sense to have and adhere to inflexible beliefs, however, it is pointless to have debates about them, and fraudulent to entice others in bad faith to engage in such debates under the false pretense that one's mind is open when it is in fact closed.
In science one can only assess claims if they are in principle falsifiable. In markets one can only haggle over an exchange if there are prices, as opposed to matters some humans hold sacred to the point they are not for sale at any price. In the law a prosecutor can only bear a burden of providing proof beyond reasonable amounts of doubt, but not that of addressing all possible doubts.
Similarly, if "reasoned debate" is to have any meaning, it is reliant on a foundation consisting of the tacit or implicit promise by participants that they have open minds and would change their opinions or positions under some reasonable set of circumstance of feasibly demonstrable set of evidence and arguments. And the best and quickest way to test for this condition at the very outset is simple to ask one's opponent to explicitly articulate those circumstances in advance. "Provide me a target to aim at, and commit on your honor that should I hit it, you will be persuaded." It doesn't have to be "on honor", though sometimes that's enough. One could go further and actually put some real money at stake in a big public bet.
And if the person you are dealing with is unwilling to do that, then best to move on to someone who will.
I'm not even sure if one side or the other has to be able to change their position. Your position and mine might differ on some fundamental premise that's not subject to scientific proof or disproof.
The obvious example of this is abortion: many, if not most, opponents of abortion on demand believe that the conceptus has a moral status close to or equal to that of someone who's been born; many, if not most, proponents of AOD believe that its moral status is far less than that of a born human being. These beliefs aren't subject to scientific proof or disproof; and their holders' stance on abortion derive from those fundamental premises, so can't be changed by factual evidence.
But nevertheless, reasoned debate can occur. It might not change minds, but at least it can give each side a more charitable picture of the other. In the absence of such debate, it's easy for supporters of AOD to believe that its opponents only want to subjugate women; and easy for opponents to believe that supporters are indifferent to the suffering and death of helpless babies. Let the two sides encounter one another in a non-hostile fashion, and it's far less easy for each to regard the other as a collection of moral monsters who need to be suppressed by any means possible.
Most liberals say the same thing. Neither is accurate though I agree it often seems that way. If nothing else, I'd suggest you attend some Braver Angels events. Probably not exactly what you are looking for but it might be close. It might give you some hope.
Reading Chernow's biography of Washington, I was continually struck by Washington's example of leadership and how he thrived on duty, restraint and the courage to leave power. This as opposed to today's buffoons who are in constant campaign mode and prone to moral grandstanding, or as you say, their entitlement to rule. It would be so refreshing to watch our political stewards strengthen our institutions if they'd see themselves as temporary guardians of the republic instead of perpetual antagonists.
"Sowell argues that people on the left who are politically engaged behave as if they were anointed with wisdom that others lack. This belief is so strongly held that nothing counts as evidence against it. It is an axiom, not an empirically falsifiable proposition."
I think it's a function of the desire to reward cooperators and punish defectors that you've written about previously. The Ezra Klein types probably conceive the situation as being one where their coalition favors more collective action, which they classify as a form of cooperation and thus pro-social behavior, while their opponents do not, making them defectors and thus anti-social, little different from chronic litterers or vandals. You can understand how this would lead to a sense of self-righteousness: if your primary political opposition is comprised largely of people exhibiting anti-social tendencies, you'd never consider them legitimate, either.
If you ask me, this is a cognitive failure born of sub-Dunbar thinking, but I'm sure I've got my own epistemological failure modes, also.
I think it's mainly that the other side is happy with sending random Venezuelan people straight to Salvadoran prison without a trial. Etc etc, examples could be multiplied.
I say this in full knowledge that Democrats are on board with a lot of race and sex discrimination and have done much evil in service of that goal. Still, the El Salvador thing plus January 6, etc etc, reflects worse moral values and quality of thinking.
That sense of moral superiority also stems from the fact that most progressives only know people like themselves. It’s the “ conservatives in the mist” of Jonah Goldberg. Consequently they automatically assign the worst intentions to people and ideas they literally do not understand, hence the idea that Americans are the worst bigots on the planet and need to be managed and educated serves as virtue signaling and justification for censure.
The basket of deplorables, flyover country.
“Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon? I don’t know anyone who voted for Richard Nixon.”
"meaning the ability of government to build things without its own regulations getting in the way"
Love this definition of "abundance".
You know the abundance crowd never wants to just get out of the way of people.
People aren't going to be in charge of their education (they are against school vouchers). People aren't going to be in charge of their entrepreneurial decisions (we should have industrial policy directed by people like them) people should't have more control over their paycheck (we need higher taxes and a robust welfare state).
The regulations on people are to stay in place, but blue cities are supposed to get out of their own ways (and possibly real estate developers, but not too much).
Noah Smith the other day asks what MAGA has built. But I'm living in what MAGA built. MAGA built high speed rail (bright line). It build the #1 housing development in the country (that I'm living in). It is building private education via universal school choice. My state is arguing over just how much taxes to cut because of our huge budget surplus.
MAGA is about getting government, especially the federal government, out of the way of building. It gives freedom back to people.
Trump's industrial policy sure doesn't give freedom back to the people. That personal power grab in the US Steel deal and his constant threats to Walmart, Amazon, and others who dare to say his tariffs have raised prices don't give freedom back to the people.
I've decided I don't think this kind of threat or even the tariffs mean a whole lot to "freedom".
Tariffs are no more of an diminuation on freedom to any individual than any other tax. It is, but in our society, where we have a hundred different taxes already, the effect of Trump's anti-freedom policies is pretty marginal.
On the other hand, as forumposter123 says, the effect of Trump's pro-freedom policies is pretty noticeable. I know it will be controversial, but I'll add law-enforcement and anti-DEI stuff as pro-freedom.
Simply put, every political policy, by definition, is a trade-off between different margins of freedom. There is no Pareto improving policy in most real-world cases.
Trump has, on balance, done more to improve freedom than Biden did or Harris would have. That doesn't mean pretending personal freedom is what drives his decisions.
Now imagine all those hundred different taxes change on personal whims of the President, sometimes daily, and very much dependent on said President's fragile ego and what various shadowy insiders have been whispering in his ear.
Tell me that doesn't infringe on freedom and destroy economies.
1. I never said personal freedom is what drives Trump's (or any politician's) decisions because I don't think it does. It's pretty irrelevant.
2. ... and we see its irrelvance because all of those hundred different taxes don't change on personal whims of the president. If you think that's what's going on now, I'd ask you to square that belief with the fact that the economy seems to be doing fine and, by your own admission, more is being done to "improve freedom" than we could have expected under the alternatives.
I don't think Trump is uniquely ego-driven or that his ego is particularly fragile compared to the average politician. The difference is simply that Trump is willing to get up and publicly say things to get his way, and that Trump is reported on with their weird naïveté as if every soundbite he utters is an official proclamation of policy. Even when it's obvious it isn't.
The difference is just that it's perhaps more visible. Which is a good thing, actually.
forumposter wrote "It[MAGA] gives freedom back to people". That's where the "personal freedom" topic comes from.
And speaking of losing the thread, the fact that those hundred taxes don't change on the personal whims of the president, but his tariffs do, was exactly my point in comparing the two.
The economy "seems" to be doing just fine is a ridiculous assertion. His latest tariffs haven't even gone into effect yet, and the ones which have taken effect have only raised taxes $300 billion or so.
The funniest thing about Trumpies is how they brag on his reducing taxes, brag on tariff revenue, and refuse to admit that increased tariff revenue is a tax increase.
Did you object when Biden censored social media? Then you should have objected when Trump threatened Amazon and Walmart for raising prices to pay for his tax increases.
Bro, I spend my entire career debating which of a hundred different taxes or regulations or rates will change daily based on the arbitrary whims of CMS, or congress, or some judge somewhere.
Four years ago whether my kids school would be open or whether I'd be allowed to leave the house was largely based on such daily changing arbitrary whims.
Don't know what planet your on.
"and the ones which have taken effect have only raised taxes $300 billion or so."
Yeah, that's how the math pens on the tariffs he's likely to collect. It also works out to around what his BBB costs a year. Remarkable, he replaced income taxes with a modest tax on foreign goods in response to record trade deficits.
He basically got Americans to accept a modest VAT in exchange for income taxes.
While also getting foreigners to make longer term investments in America (instead of a bunch of treasury hot money that could abandon us in a second).
"and refuse to admit that increased tariff revenue is a tax increase."
Bro today CMS is going to announce that the CBO score on the IRA was off by a billions more a year, something literally everyone in the industry predicted. I remember when Biden called it "savings" and used it to justify more spending.
I object, but I also see a difference between threats and negotiation tactics (which Amazon and Walmart were also employing) and actual, formal government action. A threatened tariff, which may or may not happen is not a tariff.
I had no idea the tariffs were raising $300B. That's actually amazing. Pre-COVID that would represent 30-50% of the total deficit. It's not insubstantial as I've been lead to believe.
I just read the tariffs raised only $150 billion in the first six months. Possibly I remembered that as $300 billion for a full year, but that assumes the second six months repeat the first.
Ripe areas of abundance include home affordability, electricity affordability, transportation efficiency and education. America pursued and realized these objectives in the 20th century. And then the grift game got in gear and now in many places it is crazy expensive to build homes, electricity is scarce and expensive, the roads are overused and poorly maintained and education is costly and ineffective.
The grift means no insider has the motivation to change the status quo. The insiders control the process and will always serve their self interest - the beatings will continue even as moral is further crushed.
And the local nature of these problems means a charismatic president - whether it be a Trump, an Obama or a Bill Clinton - cannot fix it. Florida can grow its real economy because it has a governor who is able to lead. Blue state politicians are beholden to the grifters, and many times the politicians are at the head of the grift line!
And even in Red States the grifters are in control. There is no good reason a person who owns an acre of land shouldn't be able to quickly and cheaply build a quality home on that land. But it simply cannot be done! The regulations and controls run so deep and far even in states and counties where one would think "small government" policy was dominant, the building commission is God and it will let you know it.
"There is no good reason a person who owns an acre of land shouldn't be able to quickly and cheaply build a quality home on that land."
Location, location, location. For about 99% of privately-owned acres of US land, it is indeed quick, cheap, and easy to build a quality home. At least, substantially quicker, cheaper, and easier than it is to do so in some big metro area.
If you'll allow a little poetic quantitative license - 100% of the people have that right on 99% of the land. However, 99% of the people prefer to live close to each other on the 1% of the land where they don't get those rights.
Now, things may have changed since then, and in more places, but I once corresponded with what you might call a classic stereotypical state-hater prepper who dreamed of buying some land in the middle of nowhere where he could go could nearly entirely off-grid, pay only a nominal amount of taxes, build whatever he wanted, have his own long-distance firing range, etc. Well, he experienced a financial windfall and went out and did it. Coming in with big metro suburban county-code-nazi-traumatized expectations, he was truly shocked how quick and easy it was.
I also knew a law professor (who was also a trained architect) who grew up on and inherited some very scenic farmland and fantasized for decades of building his own imagined and custom-designed dream mansion out there. Well, he did, and it's magnificent, and it cost him less than an Arlington bungalow which doesn't even have a carport, but where do you think his grandchild lives?
Yes, it is now undoubtedly far too difficult and expensive to build in big metro areas. But, complain though they do, the market reveals that people don't really think the situation is bad enough to try some feasible alternatives which mostly they seem to find even more unappealing.
Agree, except a partial disagree on the home affordability index. Housing is expensive for lots of reasons, but one reason that doesn't get talked about is WHAT and HOW we build. Our building industry is, in large part, a fashion industry. To accommodate those fashions, we've created a secondary industry to manufacture and fabricate materials to mimic the look of the old original stuff...fake wood, fake masonry, fake stone, fake shingles, etc., etc. Those new materials have very different installation requirements which hugely increase the cost of construction.
There's a lot that goes into cost that doesn't get accounted for in the popular discourse because the people writing about it are academics or professional thought leaders with a Substack. They wonder why productivity hasn't improved in the building industry. It's not a mystery for anyone involved in home building.
Richard Hanania has done some excellent work in the past year or so arguing that Democrats (together with the small segment of Never Trump Republicans) are in fact intellectually and morally superior to MAGAs.
This was not true at the time Sowell was writing. The degeneration of the Republican base and the crank sort are a recent phenomenon.
This doesn't mean that the Democrats are all that great. Hanania would agree with you (Arnold) that thoughtful libertarians are better than Democrats on both these courts.
But it does deserve to be acknowledged. I would say that a failure to acknowledge it is your number one blind spot, actually.
I agree, by the way, that a tendency to greatly exaggerate their/our moral and political superiority is a huge blind spot on the left of center.
"These all are related problems stemming from inter-related causes. Their root is a painful, but well-earned, collapse in national trust."
People, that is just incoherent gibberish-speak, strategically dissembled to shift accountability away from the blameworthy. Which is exactly the problem! You know it wasn't written by the AI's because the AI's have already developed the minimum sense of intellectual shame that would have prevented them from doing so.
It is an absurd usage of the word 'root', i.e., an ultimate upstream cause not itself caused by its own downstream effects. As if the problem was 'trust', which somehow itself is not a consequence of observed failures stemming from a lack of trustworthiness. It would be error but at least not immediately ridiculous to say it's some kind of Catch-22 or vicious cycle, in which trust could bootstrap itself into a self-validating truth if we just believe in it like the kids in Peter Pan, but the writers like DiStefano who blame vague abstract concepts like 'trust' fall short of even the attempt to make that error.
"I’m willing to support Abundance, but not as merely a Democratic Party reform. I want it integrated into an agenda meant to restore faith in the American system and to renew America." - With this line, DiStefano double down on avoiding accountability. It's really hard to fix a problem when you refuse to clearly identify and deal with its actual root cause. He shows that he totally missed the "Everything Bagel Liberalism" (really, progressivism) point Klein and Thompson made when identifying the main culprit and driver of the phenomenon, which Klein also calls 'Vetocracy'. Much as DiStefano might not want to concede the point, it is indeed a problem particular to the American Left. And, to the extent the Left maintains enough power to stop building in America, is something that can only be remedied by, yes, reforms to the way that power is organized and manifested in the form of the Democratic Party.
To be fair, Klein and Thompson weren't quite brave (or reckless) enough to explicitly spoon-feed and hand-walk their center-left readers the whole way to the conclusion, because every step along that path creates more distracting problems for what is already an uphill battle.
Here is what "Vetocracy / Everything Bagel Progressivism" means, in real-speak translation,
"Look people, in actual reality, we cannot get everything you want. Understanding this and facing it is what it means to be be mature, well-adjusted adults in the room and not a bunch of fanatical children lost in magical thinking and imaginative fantasies untethered to actual existence. There IS scarcity, there ARE constraints and limits, of time, money, material, political power, manpower, land, everything. There are inescapable conflicts and trade-offs. Not everything is magically positive-sum. Inevitably, insurmountably, there are occasions for which, if we increase some this, there is literally no choice but to decrease some other that.
"If we are trying to get as much as much as we want that we can get, then to do so so in a smart and sane way means we need to admit these trade-offs exist, understand them, and try our best to prioritize so we can compromise to optimize. To the extent we refuse to do that, we are choosing, actively or passively, a -worse- future, one we will like -less- than a possible alternative! It is because we, the left, the current attitudes and arrangements of the American Democratic Party, cannot currently actually make these trade-offs and do this rational prioritization, that we are -screwing America up- by making it poorer and poorly-performing where nothing can get done. Not even by the GOVERNMENT which -should- theoretically (i.e., like in China, or in New Deal America) enjoy all kind of advantages in getting big things done because, it can use its legal might to just steamroller over troublemakers and roadblockers in ways that make all the power and wealth of big private companies look negligible by comparison.
"And yet, just look at and face the facts. American government now -sucks- at getting things done. Yeah, you are going to blame the right, look, I totally despite them too, but you know what, here's another wake-up call from adult reality: in the bluest places where we can blame the right the least, the government sucks the most. Ouch! I know! This is pretty bad for us, and a particular problem for our particular political side as opposed to an American problem for all distrusting Americans (only some idiot would think that) - precisely because we are the adherents of the ideology and members of the party which WANTS the GOVERNMENT to be the institution doing all these things, which prefers it to those private sectors alternatives, which advocates for more being done by government and which argues for that end not in the manner of saying it's worth the cost, but in saying that the government is actually better at doing them!
Which, sad to say, it currently IS NOT! That would be bad enough, if we could kind of keep fooling people to keep believing government is not as bad as it seems. Unfortunately, we can't even do THAT well anymore, and most people now really believe government IS just as bad as it LOOKS to be in terms getting things done. We haven't faced a collapse in pro-state-competence morale this bad since Reagan! And it's because we aren't prioritizing. We are sweating the small stuff, and for the sake of preventing a drop of some cost we are giving up an ocean of benefit.
Consequentially we are -screwing ourselves- by making our cities and our country pathetic, poorer, and poorer-performing, and making our party lose credibility and popularity, i.e., votes, i.e. POWER! Come on American Left, you let the Wokerati run things for a while, how'd that work out? "That's how you got Trump!" What, too soon? It's the second time! Now it's time to let us center-left adults-in-the-room take the wheel for a while, and get things back on track."
This is what DiStefano missed, and it shows. Now, the problem is, "Ok, and how exactly are you going to prioritize? What principle of adjudication are you going to use to settle disputes and choose between rival claims? How are you weighing all the various factors in your grand social utility formula, and what measure are you trying to optimize for? And what gives you the right to decide? How many points does Social Justice get per basket?"
This is where Klein and Thompson are going to let such a questioner down. They seem only able to vaguely point to, well, on the one hand, a Neoliberal conception of general economic growth, which doesn't exactly "excite the base", to put it mildly. Or else, on the other hand, the political expediency of whatever it takes to keep winning elections. So, some kind of CCP-like sustainable inner-party mechanism that gets the joke and is able to pay lip service to the folk version of the political ideology while at the same time knowing it's kind of childish and dangerous and preventing it from ever actually getting implemented enough that it becomes another example of the party inadvertently shooting itself in the foot, and also somehow making sure that noisy troublemakers on their left who don't get the joke nevertheless get shut out and shut down.
As more accurate versions of the truth are discovered and propagated, they become the new norm. Slowly, the popular JFK quotation evolves into a growing chorus of: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what your country is doing to you.”
The abundance movement seems to be the public choice movement in infancy. Be patient as these folks learn its fundamentals. Understand that their progress is heavily constrained by tribal loyalties, perception management, and risk of material loss. Also see the positive contribution they make to our country. Not all of them, but most.
My favorite part of this post is its opening lines, not only because of its accuracy, but because it sees dogma as a force for good and bad. You’re reinforcing in my mind that there is such thing as good dogma—perhaps synonymous with the word truth.
“A central dogma of American politics is that everyone is entitled to dignity. That is what ‘all men are created equal’ has traditionally meant.
My sense is that the central dogma of partisan Democrats is that they are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans.”
“Or you can champion ‘abundance,’ meaning the ability of government to build things without its own regulations getting in the way.”
I love love love this piece.
But I’m not sure you really meant to write “government” in the above sentence; I think you meant something like “society”.
Because I’ve never before mistaken you as advocating the “You didn’t build that” philosophy of Elizabeth Warren, or that abundance was primarily about what *government* builds.
He is applying the phrase, I think, to indicate what Ezra Klein believes it means.
I think you are partly correct, but only partly.
Even Ezra Klein doesn’t think government is directly responsible for *all* abundance, even as I agree he gives it more direct credit than I - or AK - would.
He mostly just wants to not quite so much strangle the goose that lays the golden eggs so that there will be more such eggs for government to take and put towards his favorite leftist causes.
The Dems definition of “abundance” rather than a common sense definitions
So much hubris, and so little self-awareness. Klein approaches a decent level of self-knowledge, but whenever he says something reasonable (e.g. Biden isn't fit to be President) he gets shouted down by his own. And now the few who are piling in on "Abundance" with token deregulatory gestures seem to be just engaging in cynical electioneering.
It’s great to quote Sowell, and maybe especially The Vision of the Anointed. Rob Henderson’s Luxury Beliefs is a better phrase, but a subset of the Vision based beliefs. Tho from 1994, most of the topical examples Sowell uses are still relevant, including outrage over higher infant death of black babies delivered by white doctors.
It would be great if Arnold would do a book review of it.
Or even get an interview with Sowell, now 96?
Sadly, Tom Lehrer died, at 97.
Abundance as non-partisan is a great idea.
Abundance, for the working & middle classes, is already Trump’s econ plan.
And it’s working. Especially tariffs.
Most “expert” economists have a Blind Spot about tariffs & leverage, including AK. Recent trade deals, with Japan and especially Europe, show Trump’s deal instincts as better than Ivory Tower theory.
https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1949544940616487419 for example.
Having never heard of Abundance (capital A) and have just read that piece (linked) and still missing it, can someone here explain in in English?