^{Wealth & Poverty Review} Can the Left Do “Abundance”?

I have to admit: I’m baffled by the new “abundance” movement. You may have run across it in recent books, tweets and Substacks, pitching an abundance agenda as a new packaging for the left.

Fearing a long journey in the political wilderness, Democrats are trying on different skins, much like the serial killer in “Silence of the Lambs.” The Bernie Sanders-esque “benefits over billionaires” is as tired as prune juice. So now we have “Supply-Side Progressives.” And “Abundance Liberals.” Just writing this triggers my oxymoron radar.

Abundance could work. It certainly sounds better than anything else I’ve heard recently, including James Carville’s suggestion for Democrats to “play dead.” But my immediate reaction was: Where’ve ya been?

In 1981 George Gilder wrote about supply-side economics in his book “Wealth and Poverty.” Ronald Reagan read it and embraced its message, enabling decades of technology-led growth. Also, Mr. Gilder was one of the first to talk about abundance. His most important economic axiom, for me anyway, is “waste what’s abundant to make up for what’s scarce.” Silicon Valley lives by this.

“What’s abundant is cheap,” Mr. Gilder told me at a dinner in 2009. “The price signal tells you to waste it. What’s scarce is expensive. Instead of using economics to allocate what’s scarce, just waste something else until what you want is no longer scarce.”

We waste abundant cheap transistors inside microchips to offset the need for expensive computers and wires. We waste abundant bandwidth instead of driving to a library to look stuff up. And now we waste abundant computing power for generative artificial intelligence. Mr. Gilder noted, “The scarcest resource is time, which always becomes scarce as other things become abundant. It is human genius that transcends the scarcity of time.” That’s economic productivity in a nutshell.

From what I can gather, the left’s version of their so-called abundance era isn’t to encourage a further digital revolution, but instead to tap the power of big government. Rather than subsidizing demand—talk about waste—this neoabundance crowd suggests that big government should magically create abundance by edict. Build green energy systems, more housing, vertical farms, more healthcare infrastructure. Easier said than done.

Reforming rules for new housing permits is long overdue. Others on the left—they sure love to disagree—criticize the Johnny-come-lately abundance agenda because of a latent fear of deregulation. Oh no, not that! They need to get over it.

I’m all for abundance. The Trump administration’s deregulation moves, though somewhat offset by tariff tantrums, are the right step. But abundance liberals’ idea of creating more government to create more abundance is seriously misguided. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in their new book “Abundance,” point to California’s San Francisco-to-Los Angeles high-speed rail as a government project mired in regulation and environmental reviews.

Sure. But that’s not really why the cuckoo choo-choo—Southwest Airlines flies that trip virtually every hour—failed. Instead it was government incompetence. The line could have run along the Interstate 5 corridor, in many cases right between the north and southbound lanes on land the government already controlled.

The Biden administration was filled with similar incompetence. Electric-vehicle chargers that hardly got installed. Rural broadband that never got connected. Stranded astronauts that SpaceX rescued. Trust in government is gone. Now the Trump administration is deploying tariffs which create artificial shortages. That’s anti-abundance.

I spoke to Mr. Gilder last week for an update. He’s a big fan of time prices, “the one impeachable standard to compare abundance from one era to another era. How many hours does it take a typical worker to earn a set of goods and services?” It turns out that “all goods and services from the private sector are radically cheaper in time prices, while government services are the one function that has actually increased in cost in most cases.” Why am I not surprised?

The abundance era has a long history, from abundant coal to fuel the industrial revolution to abundant electricity to run labor-saving devices such as electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Now we have ChatGPT. In each case, it was entrepreneurs and human genius wasting what’s abundant to make up for what’s scarce. Real abundance: 3-D printed homes, early disease detection, AI help lines, nukes.

Sure, we’re all enthralled by interstate highways and moon landings, but the government’s true role is to set the rules of the sandbox and then get out of the way—yes, make themselves scarce! For Democrats, recognizing this may be their real shortcut out of the political wilderness.