Why won't Neoliberals just run on Neoliberalism if Abundance isn't a scam?
Huh? Those are just two words that have very similar, overlapping meanings. Same with "New Liberalism" or "Silicon Valley Democrats" or "Supply-Side Progressivism" or "Liberal Technocracy" or "Drawbridge-Down" in The Economist styling...whatever you want to call it. Maybe you can differentiate between some of those things if you squint hard enough, but they're essentially the same cluster of ideas. You can fixate on the labels if you want. I don't really care which one you want to pick. You don't have to pick any of them at all.
Ezra and Derrick have said that they want an FDR style agenda that makes government efficient, progressive and work for the people. Is that what you take from Abundance?
That refers to acknowledging tradeoffs and building more stuff by removing barriers. So for example, let's look at Zohran Mamdani's answer to a housing question, versus how an abundance liberal might respond. (This is just an example, the particulars here aren't that important.)
Note the bait-and-switch in this response. Mamdani, to his credit, is better than most socialists in that he doesn't immediately reject the premise of this question and start ranting about how real estate developers are the Great Satan or whatever. He even claims to believe that the private sector is critical to addressing the problem. OK, good start (although even his top-line goal of 200,000 new homes in the next decade is woefully insufficient and less than NYC builds now).
But then let's look at the highlighted portion. What that reads like is "I'll allow real estate developers to build more housing as long as they do burdensome things A, B, C, D, and E. And if those aren't enough to dissuade them, then I'll add burdensome things F, G, and H later.
Reading between the lines here, he isn't actually serious about wanting developers to build housing, at least not if it interferes with a half-dozen other things. This is, at best, an inability to prioritize and, at worst, a deliberate ruse. The abundance approach would be to say that if you actually are serious about building more housing, then cut the red tape and get out of the way. Does every private sector project really need union labor and rent-stabilization and sustainability and land-use review and blah blah blah? Well, that's going to mean less housing gets built. Figure out which one or two things are top priorities, and cut away the rest of the nonsense. Don't try to do everything at once if your main goal is to increase the housing supply.
