Is Abundance just Deregulation in disguise?

or, should Klein go full MAGA?

Many have suggested that because red states frequently don’t experience the level of acute building issues that the left does, that means that Abundance is naturally at home on the right. I disagree with this formulation. Quoting Klein and Thompson:

One reason for that is we don’t see ourselves as effective messengers to the right. There are people seeking complementary reforms in that coalition, such as James Pethokoukis, author of The Conservative Futurist; the economist Tyler Cowen, who has called for a “State Capacity Libertarianism”;18 and the array of policy experts organized in the Niskanen Center. We wish them well.

But we focus on the left for larger reasons. This book is motivated in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change. To the extent that the right simply does not believe this—and in America, at least, it does not—it strikes us as naïve to describe the policies that would help Republicans build green infrastructure faster. It is folly to expect a coalition that does not share our goals to do the work to achieve them.

In this blog post, I’m going to address the idea that Abundance is just another term for Deregulation, which is historically associated with the Republican party. If Abundance and Deregulation are essentially the same, then that could mean that Klein and Thompson have misplaced focus on the left and would be better served by going on Joe Rogan and wearing a MAGA hat or something.

Abundance isn’t just Deregulation

Abundance isn’t just another term for a deregulatory movement where the government “gets out of the way” of private actors. What differentiates Abundance from deregulation is its progressive slant. As Klein and Thompson write:

Progressivism’s promises and policies, for decades, were built around giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford. The Affordable Care Act subsidizes insurance that people can use to pay for health care. Food stamps give people money for food. Housing vouchers give them money for rent. Pell Grants give them money for college. Tax credits for child care give people money to buy child care. Social Security gives them money for retirement. The minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit give them more money for anything they want. These are important policies, and we support them.

In an effort to appeal to the right, the support of these Democratic policies would be a bitter pill to swallow. Demand-side policies such as stimulus spending are usually the focus of the left since they view non-governmental suppliers as suspect. The reason Abundance is inclusive of both supply-side reform and demand-side policies is basically because the authors understands economics.

The problem is that if you subsidize demand for something that is scarce, you’ll raise prices or force rationing.4 Too much money chasing too few homes means windfall profits for homeowners and an affordability crisis for buyers. Too much money chasing too few doctors means long wait times or pricey appointments.

Which leads us to the Republican rejoinder we are so familiar with today:

This leads to the standard Republican riposte: Just don’t subsidize demand. Keep the government out of it. Let the market work its magic. That’s fine for goods where access is not a matter of justice. If virtual-reality headsets are expensive, well, so be it. It is not a public policy problem if most households cannot afford a VR headset. But that cannot be said for housing and education and medicine. Society cares about access to these goods and services, as well it should.

Clearly Abundance is not a strict advocate for purely left or right political goals. The Abundance bros share more in common with Lee Kuan Yew than either the American left or American right. LKY oversaw the Singaporean Miracle: the rapid evolution of Singapore from a resource limited trading port to an economic powerhouse - and his emphasis of both statism and capitalism largely mirrors the values found in Abundance.

The original Abundance bro

A brief history of Deregulation

Much of the deregulatory agenda is over attributed to Reagan. Inflation spiked under Carter’s term, and he reacted to this rapid change with deregulation. Firstly, he appointed Alfred Kahn, an economist sympathetic to deregulation, to the Civil Aeronautics Board, the predecessor to the NTSB. Kahn was tasked to deregulate the aviation industry. Then he signed the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the purpose of which was to unwind the level of control the CAB had over the industry.

Carter then signed the Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978, The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, the Motor Carrier Act, and the Staggers Rail Act. All of these were premised on deregulation of the associated industries. Reagan of course came in and added onto this agenda over the course of two terms, giving Deregulation the conservative valence it has today.

Where Abundance departs from simply being a wonky front for deregulation is that the Abundance bros are much more sympathetic to Carter and FDR than to Reagan. Where deregulation takes place, the Abundance bros suggest, is to clear the road for governmental action.

Should Klein don the MAGA hat?

Suggesting that Klein should market Abundance to the right is essentially another way of saying the inevitable: that he should wear the hat. He should go on conspiracy podcasts and talk about how great Trump is, and how terrible the Democratic party is and so on. That because Reagan did a deregulation one time, that means that the modern Republican party is still a place for smart men to execute on high-minded ideals.

But this has been tried before.

Many smart men have attempted to infiltrate the right and tried to use Trump towards hidden goals. This has not worked for virtually anyone, because they believe that Trump is gullible and susceptible to flattery—that if you jump like a good boy, he’ll keep you around. In truth, he only keeps you around for as long as you are useful to him.

This gets to the reason why I don’t think a MAGA Abundance will work. The issue is that Abundance is a nuanced, nonpartisan movement to improve the relative balance of demand and supply-side policy in the United States. MAGA does not care about this, because they don’t care about ideas in the first place.

It’s been said that because the housing crisis is more acute in blue areas than red ones, that somehow means that Abundance can’t work on the left. Firstly, Republicans don’t have majorities in these blue states so even if they were convinced of Abundance, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. Secondly, Republicans do not care about Abundance, as the ideas outlined in Abundance are only partially amenable to partisan right-wing politics. There’s just very little room in the Republican party for a strong government that builds great public works.

Klein and Thompson’s choice to address their arguments to the left makes sense, since not only are these issues most acute in blue states, those that actually choose to read the book and engage with the ideas are more likely to be on the left than the right in the first place. The left is simply the place where intense ideological discourse usually takes place, which is basically what the “circular-firing squad” meme is about. The Abundance bros want to throw their hat into the ideological ring, and wearing the MAGA hat is not a wise choice if they have any chance of succeeding.