Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, is gaining attention because it includes an unusually frank admission that Democrats have failed because they have placed other priorities ahead of economic growth.
The book, however, repeats the central mistake of liberalism under the Democratic Party, which is to presume that the role of government is to move the country towards utopia, rather than to protect its citizens from basic dangers and disaster.
Klein and Thompson’s criticisms matter because they are decidedly on the left of the political spectrum. Klein played a particularly important role in pushing for Obamacare during the heated debates of 2009-10.
That utopian policy — universal health care! — failed to reduce the cost of health insurance, or to preserve patient choice, as advertised. It did expand insurance coverage, but largely by expanding Medicaid — an expansion that continues in some Democrat-run states to the point of insolvency.
California, for example, has to borrow over $6 billion this month alone to cover shortfalls in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. The reason: California expanded Medi-Cal to illegal aliens.
Klein and Thompson dismiss concerns about migration, but it is a major reason Democrat-run governments are failing.
For all their truth-telling, Obamacare merits one mention — one! — in the book: “The Affordable Care Act subsidizes insurance that people can use to pay for health care.”
The authors deserve credit for admitting that deep-blue cities and states are failing. They note, for example, that Democrats often undermine their own policies by insisting that major public infrastructure projects also satisfy a long list of criteria (union labor, climate offsets, minority contracts) that prevents them from being built on time, under budget, or at all.
The conservatives may not be right about everything, but they have a point, the authors admit.
Crucially, Klein and Thompson also argue that today’s liberals have adopted an unnecessary and artificial presumption of scarcity. They seem to know that this is because of the religious dogma of climate change, which they share. They try to reform that orthodoxy, emphasizing investment rather than regulation, and technology that could unite “the life Americans want with the clean energy the planet could tolerate.”
Liberals need to reject scarcity, and embrace abundance, they argue.
This sounds new, but in fact it shares much with the original spirit of “democratic socialism” in the United States, which argues that an economic system that has failed in every other country where it has been tried will succeed in America because of the great abundance of wealth that generations of capitalism have produced.
Klein and Thompson share something else with socialism — namely, the belief that society can be pushed, or at least nudged, by a wise and powerful government toward an ideal condition.
It is difficult to take that proposition seriously, especially reading the book — as I did last weekend — from the home to which my family and I have been relocated due to the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles in January.
Our state, the fifth-richest economy in the world and home to the most advanced technology humanity has ever invented, failed to provide the water, or the men, necessary to fight the fires.
Never mind utopia; we don’t get the basics right here.
Speaking of the Golden State, Klein and Thompson let Governor Gavin Newsom off the hook. The authors almost laud Newsom for his willingness to admit that there is a problem with Democratic governance. They note that he wisely ended the doomed high-speed rail system that was to have connected San Francisco and L.A. But they blame “negotiating” for the delays in building Newsom’s scaled-down, rural version of the project.
They admit that the high-speed rail project would never have been built at all, had it been proposed in its present form — then lament that it is taking so long.
At some point, harder questions have to be asked about leadership, about competence — and about corruption. Indeed, President Donald Trump is auditing California’s high-speed rail project to understand where all the money went.
California’s failures matter, because Newsom is likely running for president in 2028 — hence his turn to podcasting, as his state burns. He is running on cultural issues, not on his record, because after a lifetime in office, he has no record. Over his tenure, California has neglected forestry, policing, infrastructure, water storage, elementary education — the first priorities.
Meanwhile, the state is burning — so badly, and so frequently, that it is losing six times more carbon from federal land than any other state.
The cost of utopia, for my neighbors, is the destruction of thousands of individual dreams.
We have “abundance.” We lack the basics. Write a book for Democrats about that.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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