To Get Abundance, We Need to Discipline Capital
Chief economist Brian Callaci discusses the Abundance Agenda’s faith in deregulation and private capital is misguided, and that achieving true prosperity requires robust public investment, labor protections, and democratic control over economic decision-making.
Amid the mutual recriminations inside the Democratic Party about how Americans could have elected Donald Trump to a second term, one theory has risen to prominence: President Joe Biden’s industrial policy, codified in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS Act, failed to go far or move fast enough to bring tangible improvements in the lives of the electorate. What came to be called Bidenomics failed, in short, to build enough things quickly enough for voters to notice.
A version of this diagnosis has coalesced around something called the “abundance agenda,” a slate of policy proposals whose advocates blame government red tape for Democratic failure. Excessive regulation hobbled Biden’s attempts to build, leaving voters with few visible material reasons to continue his policies, they claim. Meanwhile at the state and local level, the argument goes, red tape, zoning, and unions are similarly strangling growth and prosperity in Democratic strongholds like New York and California, causing jobs, people, and electoral votes to migrate to right-to-work, small government red states.
Currently “abundance” (the title of a best-selling book by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson) has the ear of certain Democratic Party elites. Proponents of the abundance agenda argue that Democratic governance has succumbed to an interest-group-dominated left so focused on fighting struggles over distribution and grabbing pieces of the economic pie for favored constituents that it has stifled the capacity of the economy to generate prosperity in the first place.
Abundists claim that an excess of process, paperwork, and regulation has empowered a wide variety of interest groups. These range from suburban homeowners and tenants of rent-stabilized housing, to NIMBY environmentalists, to labor unions. This coalition, abundists claim, extract rents and prevent things from being built in a timely and cost-effective manner.
While the abundance agenda’s evident skepticism of prevailing wages, workplace safety regulations, and environmental review processes has alarmed many on the Left, some discern a progressive, even radical, vision in the abundance agenda — even the seeds of “indicative economic planning.” The ostensible end goal — material prosperity — is, after all, one shared by nearly everyone, including the radical left. The Marxist vision of socialism imagines not merely the end of class exploitation, but the liberation of the productive forces from the “fetters” of capitalist relations as well.