This was posted on Facebook by Rebecca Solnit. It appears to be part of an article in Rolling Stone, but I'm not sure. It's about liberals being fooled into blaming over-regulation for bureaucratic awkwardness that is really caused by corporations and their Republican servants. Read it.
--Kim
It is very nice to see someone take down the cooptation of the good word "abundance" to mean "deregulation is magic/regulation was to blame" in this fierce piece that points out what's not true about so many of the cited examples. "But that's the trouble with the Abundance Discourse: It writes America's central scarcity problem — corporate power — out of the economic story, encourages Democrats to focus on the wrong solutions, and elevates deregulatory narratives already being weaponized by the right."
And yeah, Rolling Stone has become one of my good sources for political critique.
Here's one example from this piece: Last week, Abundance co-author Ezra Klein went viral on social media. In a widely shared video clip from Jon Stewart's podcast, Klein described the maddeningly bureaucratic process for deploying rural broadband funding under the Biden administration's bipartisan infrastructure bill — a procedure so cumbersome that barely any of the entities seeking these grants have even finished the application process, years after the bill's passage.
The anecdote hit hard — Stewart groaned and cursed as Klein elegantly demonstrated the central thesis of his book, Abundance: Red tape and overregulation, allegedly the outgrowth of progressives' obsession with process over outcomes, have become primary drivers of scarcity in America. Boosted by Fox News, Elon Musk, and thousands of retweets, the soundbite was the kind of fable of inefficient liberal government that Ronald Reagan told throughout the 1980s.
There was just one problem with the story's premise: It is demonstrably false.
The Kafkaesque nature of Biden's broadband application process was not, in fact, the result of "everything-bagel liberalism," pressure from doctrinaire leftists, or Democratic politicians' penchant for governing through checklists, which Klein and his co-author, Derek Thompson, frame in Abundance as the key obstacles to housing security, decarbonization, and other critical 21st century needs.
Rather, this burdensome procedure was created at the insistence of vote-withholding Republican senators and their cable industry donors — companies seeking to block funding to upstarts that might challenge their regional telecom monopolies or force them to provide affordable prices for broadband. After they loaded up the funding legislation with a Byzantine process, telecom giants and GOP-led states — not protocol-obsessed lefties or overly rigid bureaucrats — then manufactured a monthslong fight over what constitutes "affordable" rates, delaying quick funding for the build-out.
There are lessons to draw from this failure — for instance, Democrats' unrequited pursuit of bipartisanship can lead them to undermine their legislative initiatives. But the story Klein shared absolutely doesn't support the thrust of Abundance or the themes of the wider Abundance movement.
In fact, the takeaway from the broadband tale is that the biggest obstacles to efficiency and abundance are often corporate power and its corrupting influence on our politics — factors typically downplayed or unmentioned in the Abundance Discourse.
Censoring such topics from the conversation may get Klein and Thompson platformed by large media outlets, praise from bankrolled politicians, and ever-more book sales, but it also fortifies a narrative that lets corporate power continue to create the very scarcity that Abundance laments.
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